In the Loyal Mountains

by Rick Bass

  Between prairie and woods was a circle of giant ancient oaks. You could feel magic in this spot, could feel it rise from centuries below and brush against your face like the cool air from the bottom of a deep well. This “buffalo ring” was the only evidence that a herd of buffalo had once been held at bay by wolves, as the wolves tried, with snarling feints and lunges, to cut one of the members out of the herd. The buffalo had gathered in a tight circle to make their stand, heads all facing outward; the weaker ones had taken refuge in the center. Over and over, the sun set and the moon rose and set, again and again, as the wolves kept them in this standoff. Heads bowed, horns gleaming, the buffalo trampled the prairie with their hooves, troughed it up with nose-stinging nitrogen piss and shit in their anger and agitation.

  Whether the wolves gave up and left, or whether they darted in, grabbed a leg, and pulled out one of the buffalo—no matter, for all that was important to the prairie, there at the edge of the woods along the slow bayou, was what had been left behind. Over the years, squirrels and other animals had carried acorns to this place, burying them in the rich circular heap of shit-compost. The trees, before they were cut down, told this story.

  Swamp Boy could feel these things as he moved across the prairie and through the woods, there at the edge of that throbbing, expanding city, Houston. And I could too, as I held my ribs with both arms because of the strange soreness. I began going into the woods every night, as if summoned.

  I would walk the road he walked. I would pass beneath the same trees from which we had hung him, the limbs thick and branching over the road: the hanging trees. I would walk past those piles of flower petals and berry blossoms, and shuffle my feet through the dry brown oak leaves. Copperheads slept beneath the leaves, cold and sluggish in the night, and five-lined skinks rattled through brush piles, a sound like pattering rain. Raccoons loped down the road ahead of me, looking back over their shoulders, their black masks smudged across their delicate faces.

  I would walk past his lake. The shouting frogs fled at my approach. The water swirled and wriggled with hundreds of thousands of tadpoles—half-formed things that were neither fish nor frog, not yet of this world. As they swirled and wriggled in the moonlight, it looked as if the water were boiling.

  I would go past the lake, would follow the thin clay road through the starlit forest to its end, to a bluff high above the bayou, the round side of one of the meandering S-cuts that the bayou had carved. I know some things about the woods, even though I live in the city, have never left this city. I know some things that I learned as a child just by watching and listening—and I could use those things in my advertising, but I don’t. They are my secrets. I don’t give them away.

  I would stand and watch and listen to the bayou as it rolled past, its gentle, lazy current always murmuring, always twenty years behind. Stories from twenty years ago, stories that had happened upstream, were only just now reaching this spot.

  Sometimes I feel as if I’ve become so entombed that I have become the giant building in which I work—that it is my shell, my exoskeleton, like the seashell in which a fiddler crab lives, hauling the stiff burden of it around for the rest of his days. The chitin of things not said, things not done.

  I would stand there and hold my hurt ribs, feel the breezes, and look down at the chocolate waters, the star glitter reflecting on the bayous ripples, and I would feel myself fill slowly and surely with a strength, a giddiness that urged me to jump, jump, jump. But I would hold back, and instead would watch the bayou go drifting past, carrying its story twenty more years down the line, and then thirty, heading for the gulf, for the shining waters.

  Then I’d walk back home, undress, and crawl back into bed and sleep hard until the thunder rattle of the alarm clock woke me and my parents and my brothers began to move about the house. I’d get up and begin my new day, the real day, and my ribs would be fine.

  I had a secret. My heart was wild and did not belong among people.

  I did what I could to accommodate this discrepancy.

  We continued to follow him, through the woods and beyond. Sometimes we would spy on him at his house early in the evenings. We watched him and his family at the dinner table, watched them say grace, say amen, then eat and talk. It wasn’t as if we were homeless or anything—this was back when we all still had both our parents, when almost everyone did—but still, his house was different. The whole house itself seemed to come alive when the family was inside it, seemed to throb with a kind of strength. Were they taking it from us as we watched them? Where did it come from? You could feel it, like the sun’s force.

  After dinner they gathered around the blue light of the television. Our spying had revealed to us that Daniel Boone was Swamp Boys favorite show. He wore a coonskin cap while he watched it, and his favorite part was the beginning, when Dan’l would throw the tomahawk and split the tree trunk as the credits rolled. This excited him so much each time that he gave a small shout and jumped in the air.

  After Daniel Boone, it would be time for Swamp Boys mother and father to repair his glasses, if we’d broken them that day. They’d set the glasses down on a big long desk and glue them, or put screws in them, using all sorts of tape and epoxy sealers, adjusting and readjusting them. Evidently his parents had ordered extra pairs, because we had broken them so often. Swamp Boy stood by patiently while his parents bent and wiggled the earpieces to fit him.

  How his parents must have dreaded the approach of three in the afternoon, wondering, as it drew near the time for him to get out of school and begin his woods walk home, whether today would be the day that the cruel boys would attack their son. What joy they felt when he arrived home unscathed, back in the safety of his family.

  We grew lean through the spring as we chased him toward the freedom of summer. I was convinced that he was absorbing all of our strength with his goodness, his sweetness. I could barely stand to watch the petals spill from his pockets as we twirled him from the higher and higher limbs, could barely make my legs move as we thundered along behind him, chasing him through the woods.

  I avoided getting too close, would not become his friend, for then the other boys would treat me as they treated him.

  But I wanted to watch.

  In May, when Hidden Lake began to warm up, Swamp Boy would sometimes stop off there to catch things. The water was shallow, only neck deep at the center, full of gars, snakes, fish, turtles, and rich bayou mud at its bottom. It’s gone now. The trees finally edged in and spread their roots into that fertile swamp bottom, taking it quickly, and no sooner had the trees claimed the lake than they were in turn leveled to make way for what came next—roads, a subdivision, making ghosts of the forest and the lake.

  Swamp Boy kept a vegetable strainer and an empty jar in his lunch box. He set his tape-mended glasses down on a rotting log before opening his lunch box, flipping the clasps on it expertly, like a businessman opening his briefcase. He removed his shoes and socks and wiggled his feet in the mud. When his glasses were off like that, we could creep to within twenty or thirty feet of him.

  A ripple blew across the water—a slight mystery in the wind or a subtle swamp movement just beneath the surface. I could feel some essence, a truth, down in the soil beneath my feet—but I’d catch myself before saying to the other boys, “Lets go.” Instead of jumping into the water or giving myself up to the search for whatever that living essence was beneath me, I watched.

  He crouched down, concentrating, looking out over the lake and those places where the breeze had made a little ring or ripple. Then came the part we were there to see, the part that stunned us: Swamp Boy’s great race into the water. Building up a good head of steam, running fast and flat-footed in his bare feet, he charged in and slammed his vegetable strainer down into the reeds and rushes. Just as quickly he was back out, splashing, stumbling, having scooped up a big red wad of mud. He emptied the contents onto the ground. The mud wriggled with life, all the creatures writhing and gasping, terrible creatures with
bony spines or webbed feet or pincers and whiskers.

  After carefully sorting through the tadpoles—in various stages of development; half frog and half fish, looking human almost, like little round-headed human babies—angry catfish, gasping snapping turtles, leaping newts, and hellbenders, he put the catfish, the tadpoles, and a few other grotesqueries in his jar filled with swamp water, and then picked up all the other wriggling things and threw them back into the lake.

  Then he wiped his muddy feet off as best as he could, put his shoes and socks and strainer in his lunch box, and walked the rest of the way home barefoot. From time to time he held the jar up to the sun, to look at his prizes swimming around in that dirty water. The mud around his ankles dried to an elephant-gray cake. We followed him to his house at a distance, as if escorting him.

  That incredible force field, a wall of strength, when he disappeared into his house, into the utility room to wash up—the whole house glowed with it, something emanated from it. And once again I could feel things, lives and stories, meaningful things, stirring in the soil beneath my feet.

  I continued to walk out to the woods each night, awakening with a pain so severe in my chest and ribs, a pain and a hunger both, that I could barely breathe.

  Could I run out and catch a frog or a tadpole, launch myself wild-assed into the muddy water? Could I bring a shovel out to the prairie one night and dig down, deep down, in search of an old buffalo skull that would still smell rank and earthy but gleam white in the moonlight when I pulled it up? If I had intended to do any of those things, if I had dared to—if I had had the strength and the courage—I should have done so then.

  In the evenings, after spying on him as he watched TV, we’d go home to our own suppers, then return and look in on him again. We wouldn’t devil him, just watch him. We’d line up, a couple of us at each window, and peer in from the darkness like raccoons.

  In his room Swamp Boy had six aquariums set beneath neon lights. He kept the other lights turned off, so that all you could see were his catfish and the hellish tadpoles. There were filters and air pumps bubbling away in those aquariums, humming softly. The water was so clear that it must have seemed like heaven to those poor rescued creatures that had been living in a Houston mud hole.

  The catfish were pretty, as were even the feather-gilled tadpoles—morpho-frogs whose hind legs trailed uselessly behind them. He went from tank to tank, bending over to examine the creatures with his patched-up glasses that made him look like a little surgeon. He pressed his nose against the glass and stared in wonder, open-mouthed, touching the sides of the aquarium with his fingers while the sleek, wild-whiskered catfish and bulge-bellied tadpoles circled and swarmed in lazy schools, rising and falling as if with purpose. He tried to count his charges. We’d see him point at them with his index finger, saying the words out loud or to himself, softly, “One, two, three, four...”

  There was a bottle of aspirin on his desk and a heater in each of the tanks, for cold winter nights. Whenever he suspected that a catfish or a tadpole was feeling ill, he’d drop an aspirin in the water. It would make a cloudy trail as it fell.

  Sometimes he’d lie in bed with his hands behind his head and watch the fish and tadpoles go around and around in their new home. When the moon was up and the lights were off it looked as though his room were under water—as if he were under water among the catfish.

  God, we were devils. It occurred to a couple of the older boys to see how far he could run. Usually we caught him and strung him up fairly quickly, after only a short chase, but one day we tried to run him to exhaustion, to try and pop his fat, strong heart.

  After school we put on wolf masks and made spiked collars by driving nails through leather dog collars, which we fastened around our necks. We spoke to one another in snarling laughs, our voices muffled through the wolf masks.

  We started out after him the minute he hit the woods, bending our heads low to the ground and pretending to sniff his scent, howling, trotting along behind him, loping and barking. We chased him through the woods and down along the bayou on the other side of a forested ridge. In his fear he started making sounds like a lost calf. There was cane along the bayou, flood-killed, dry-standing ghost bamboo, and Swamp Boy plowed through that as if going through a dead corn field, snapping the bamboo in all directions, running as if the forces of hell had opened up.

  All we were going to do was throw mud on him, once he got too tired to go any farther. Roll him around in the mud a little, maybe. And break his glasses, of course.

  But this time he was really afraid.

  It was exciting, chasing him through the tiger-slash stripes of light, following the swath of his flight through all that knocked-over dead bamboo. It was about the most exciting thing we had ever done.

  We chased him to the small bluff overlooking the bayou, and Swamp Boy paused for only the briefest of seconds before making a Tarzan dive into the milky brown water. He swam immediately for the slick clay bank on the other side, toward north Houston where the rich people lived, where I imagined he would skulk up to some rich persons back yard, shivering, shoeless, smelling like some vile swamp thing, waiting until dark, so large was his shame. He’d hide in their bushes, perhaps, before creeping up to the back porch—still dripping wet and muddy, and bloody from where the canes had stabbed him—and then, crying, ask if he could use the telephone.

  If this were not all a lie, a re-creation or manipulation of the facts, and if I were the boy who had chased the other boy through the cane, rather than the boy who had leapt into the muddy bayou, then what I would have done, what I should have done, was something heroic: I would have held out my hands like an Indian chief, stopping the other boys from jumping in and swimming after him, or even from gloating. I would have said something noble, like, “He got away. Let him go.”

  I might even have gone home and called Swamp Boy’s parents, so that he wouldn’t have to lurk in the shadows in some rich person’s yard—afraid to walk home through the woods because of the masked gang, but also afraid to go ask to use the phone.

  That’s what I’d have done if I were the boy who chased him, rather than the boy who got chased, and who made that swim. Who kept, and worshiped, those baroque creatures in his aquarium.

  I was that boy, and I was the other one too. I was at the edge of fear, the edge of hesitancy, and had not yet—not then—turned back from it.

  There’s a heavy rain falling today. The swamps are writhing with life.

  Fires

  SOME YEARS the heat comes in April. There is always wind in April, but with luck there is warmth too. When the wind is from the south, the fields turn dry and everyone in the valley moves his seedlings outdoors. Root crops are what do best up here. The soil is rich from all the many fires, and potatoes from this valley taste like candy. Carrots pull free of the dark earth and taste like crisp sun. Strawberries do well here if they’re kept watered.

  The snow has left the valley by April, has moved up into the surrounding woods, and then by July the snow is above the woods, retreating to the cooler, shadier places in the mountains. But small oval patches of it remain behind. As the snow moves up into the mountains, snowshoe hares, gaunt but still white, descend on the gardens fresh berry plants. You can see the rabbits, as white as Persian cats, from a mile away, coming after your plants, hopping through sun-filled woods and over rotting logs, following centuries-old game trails of black earth.

  The rabbits come straight for my outside garden like relentless zombies, and I sit on the back porch and sight in on them. But they are too beautiful to kill in great numbers. I shoot only one every month or so, just to warn them. I clean the one I shoot and fry it in a skillet with onions and half a piece of bacon.

  At night when I’m restless, I go from my bed to the window and look out. In spring I see the rabbits standing at attention around the greenhouse, aching to get inside. Several of them will dig at the earth, trying to tunnel in, while others sit there waiting.

  Once
the snow is gone, the rabbits begin to lose their white fur—or rather, they do not lose it, but it begins to turn the mottled brown of decaying leaves. Finally the hares are completely brown, and safe again, indistinguishable from the world around them.

  I haven’t lived with a woman for a long time. Whenever one does move in with me, it feels as if I’ve tricked her, caught her in a trap, as if the gate has been closed behind her, and she doesn’t yet realize it. It’s very remote up here.

  One April a runner came to the valley to train at altitude. She was the sister of my friend Tom. Her name was Glenda, and she was from Washington State. Glenda had run races in Italy, France, and Switzerland. She told everyone, including the rough loggers and their wives, that this was the most beautiful place she had ever seen, and we believed her. Very few of us had ever been anywhere else to be able to question her.

  We often sat at the picnic tables in front of the saloon, ten or twelve of us at a time, half of the town, and watched the river. Ducks and geese, heading north, stopped in our valley to breed, build nests, and raise their young. Ravens, with their wings and backs shining greasy in the sun, were always flying across the valley, from one side of the mountains to the other. Anyone who needed to make a little money could always do so in April by planting seedlings for the Forest Service, and it was an easier rime because of that fact, a time of no bad tempers, of worries put aside for a while. I did not need much money, in April or in any other month, and I would sit at the picnic table with Glenda and Tom and Nancy, Toms wife, and drink beer. Glenda had yellow hair that was cut short, and lake-blue eyes, a pale face, and a big grin, not unlike Toms, that belied her seriousness, though now that she is gone, I remember her always being able to grin because of her seriousness. Like the rest of us, Glenda had no worries, not in April and certainly not later on, in the summer. She had only to run. She was separated from her boyfriend, who lived in California, and she didn’t seem to miss him, didn’t ever seem to think about him.