In the Loyal Mountains

by Rick Bass

  When Wejumpka was six, the year before the divorce, he dressed up as Porky Pig for Halloween. The other children were devils or witches or Green Berets with rubber knives clenched between their teeth, but Wejumpka was Porky Pig, and he went from house to house hugging people when they answered the door. He never asked for candy, not quite understanding that part of it, but instead ran into these strangers’ living rooms and latched on to their legs, giving them a tight thigh hug. Vern and Ann were having one of their dinner parties in which they would end up insulting each other in front of the guests, and it was my job to take Wejumpka around to all the nearby houses and bring him safely back.

  Vern and Ann had not started their fight, though, by the time we returned. It’s possible that they were still a little in love, or thought they were; when they answered the door and saw their own little Porky Pig standing in front of them, they looked at each other and smiled. They had been drinking.

  “Trick or treat!” Wejumpka shouted through his plastic mask, hopping up and down. I had tried to explain to him how it worked, that sometimes it was best not to hug. He was overjoyed, after the running chaos of the night, all the hurried darkness, at seeing his mother and father standing in the doorway with the bright lights of the party behind them, all the safe noise.

  “Trick or treat!” he shouted again, jumping up and down once more.

  Ann frowned and took a step back. “Why, you’re scary,” she said, and Wejumpka stopped hopping and looked at me.

  “Whose little boy are you?” Vern asked, bending down and peering into the mask. “I don’t believe I know any little Porky Pig boys,” he said, shaking his head. And they closed the door.

  “It’s me!” Wejumpka screamed, struggling to get out of the hot costume and mask. “It’s me! It’s your little boy!”

  His parents swung the door open, and this rime the guests were gathered around it, laughing as Wejumpka flew into Ann’s arms, crying. She patted him on the back and made soft comforting sounds.

  After the divorce, Vern’s sports car stopped running, and he never fixed it; it sat in the small woodshed-garage behind his apartment. Mice built their nests in and around the engine; they nibbled the insulation off the electrical wiring. Birds nested in the rafters of the shed, and the car was soon dappled with what seemed to be their hearty enthusiasm. When Vern does go to work now, he walks. Or Zachary’s girl picks him up. Vern slumps in the seat beside her and drinks rum from the bottle, still wearing the suit he wore the day before, and the day before that.

  Sometimes I drive Vern over to Zachary’s. We’ll play cards at a little linoleum-covered table that rocks whenever we lean our elbows on it. Zachary’s girl and Vern drink from the same bottle, but Zachary and I drink from jelly glasses.

  “Lot of bad shit goin’ around,” Zachary will say, shaking his head, studying his hand as if it’s the first game of cards he has ever played in his life. Zach’s girl and Vern giggle, look at each other’s hands. At just such an opportunity, Zachary and I start talking about football, talking as if we’ll run ourselves into another winning streak, talking and drinking rum with hope and idiocy. Zach’s girl and Vern slide to the floor, in a way becoming rum themselves. They land in a tangled heap.

  The room grows quiet. By this time the moon might be up and full. Zachary sighs and turns to the window, thinking perhaps about Vern’s rotting sports car—Zachary could fix it, maybe, or weld it to the top of a tower he could climb each day after work. He could sit behind the steering wheel and dream that he was a sailor in a crow’s nest, peering out at everything, ever mindful of the treasure he had hidden away.

  When Wejumpka entered junior high school, he finally stopped hugging people. The authorities made him stop. They told Ann that he couldn’t come to school anymore if he continued. He was hugging teachers, students, the custodians, the principal. He was considered a disciplinary problem.

  Vern and I decided to change his name then. He was getting too old for Wejumpka—though its what Vern and I still call him—but God knows, Montrose was nothing to fall back on. In order to settle the matter, we told him to pick a name from a wooden bowl that had a lot of slips of paper in it, and “Vern Jr.” was the one he pulled out. Fate.

  He is luckier than Zach’s girl, though, and luckier even than Zach, who has some malaise in his blood, some unknown chemical that makes him have to lie down and rest every time the wind changes direction.

  For his twelfth birthday, I rented a boat and two pairs of water skis and took Wejumpka and his cousin Austin, who was sixteen, out to a nearby lake, just the two boys and I. Neither of the boys had skied before, and for a long time we let our boat idle, feeling the warmth of the sun. Zachary had finally towed Vern’s sports car away and had indeed welded it to the top of a tower on the far side of the lake. We were some distance from shore, so we had to use binoculars to see it.

  “I pissed in that car after they got the divorce,” Austin bragged, proud and tough. He was wearing a gold earring and a dirty blue-jean jacket, even though it was close to one hundred degrees. His body gave off a fetid odor, like a boys’ restroom at school, and I wanted him to ski first so that he would get cleaned off.

  “I pooted in it,” Wejumpka admitted in a small voice. The two cousins looked at each other and then broke up laughing. I laughed too, at the coincidence of this. It came to me then how good it would feel to turn on the engine and go. The water was deep, and I could see a long way down into it, or so it seemed. I noticed fish shilly-shallying and the square marks on a turtles back.

  Wejumpka, in an odd gesture of bravery, asked to ski first. It’s possible that he wanted to show off for Austin, or perhaps he thought his father had not yet abandoned him, that he was being given one last chance. Perhaps even as he climbed down into the water, buoyed by his life vest, and slipped his feet into the oversized skis—even then, in his staggered, hugging-poet’s imagination, his father was climbing up into the car with Zachary, watching him through binoculars, giving him a final chance, maybe even elbowing Zachary and pointing to his son, saying, “That’s my little boy. That’s my Wejumpka.”

  I started the motor and tipped our craft from side to side, getting the tow rope lined up, making sure Wejumpka had his skis on properly. We moved forward slowly, but he lost his balance and went down. He was stout, though, and he bobbed right up, with a surprised look on his face. We tried again.

  When I glanced over my shoulder, I saw that he wasn’t watching the boat but the shore, squinting as if he were waiting for something to appear.

  “He says he wants to go faster!” Austin shouted, amazed at the spectacle of his cousin. “He’s pointing his thumb up. He wants to go faster!”

  I turned again and saw that it was so. Wejumpka was leaning back like a pro. Already he was relaxed, with a cocky but determined look on his face, and he was jabbing his thumb at the sky as if trying to poke out the bottom of something, skiing with just one hand.

  I eased the throttle in. The boat surged forward like a lion, but Wejumpka would not allow himself to be easily left behind. I saw that he was a little pale—the throttle was now all the way in. He was crouching into the wake, no longer showboating, trying only to hang on. We neared a wall of blue trees, and almost without realizing it, I noticed that we could see without effort the car on top of its tower, looking like the most natural thing in the world.

  We skimmed the chop of summer-wind waves. The breeze was blowing my hair, and the sun was beginning to burn my cheeks and shoulders. When I looked back, Wejumpka was gone. Austin was staring open-mouthed at the water behind us.

  Then we saw that he was still holding on to the end of the rope, though the skis were knocked off by his fall; he was bright as a fishing lure. Occasionally he raised his head above the rooster tail of water, his mouth a tiny, frightened O, gulping for air. The force of the water must have been tremendous.

  “Let go!” I shouted, easing back on the throttle. “Wejumpka, let go!” I could feel the strain on the boat.r />
  But he couldn’t hear me underwater. I had to shut the engine off and coast to a stop before he understood that the ride was over.

  The Legend of Pig-Eye

  WE USED TO GO to bars, the really seedy ones, to find our fights. It excited Don. He loved going into the dark old dives, ducking under the doorway and following me in, me with my robe on, my boxing gloves tied around my neck, and all the customers in the bar turning on their stools, as if someday someone special might be walking in, someone who could even help them out. But Don and I were not there to help them out.

  Don had always trained his fighters this way: in dimly lit bars, with a hostile hometown crowd. We would get in his old red truck on Friday afternoons—Don and Betty, his wife, and Jason, their teenage son, and my two hounds, Homer and Ann—and head for the coast—Biloxi, Ocean Springs, Pascagoula—or the woods, to the Wagon Wheel in Utica. If enough time had passed for the men to have forgotten the speed of the punches, the force and snap of them, we’d go into Jackson, to the rotting, sawdust-floor bars like the Body Shop or the Tall Low Man. That was where the most money could be made, and it was sometimes where the best fighters could be found.

  Jason waited in the truck with the dogs. Occasionally Betty would wait with him, with the windows rolled down so they could tell how the fight was going. But there were rimes when she went with us into the bar, because that raised the stakes: a woman, who was there only for the fight. We’d make anywhere from five hundred to a thousand dollars a night.

  “Mack’ll fight anybody, of any size or any age, man or woman,” Don would say, standing behind the bar with his notepad, taking bets, though of course I never fought a woman. The people in the bar would pick their best fighter, and then watch that fighter, or Betty, or Don. Strangely, they never paid much attention to me. Don kept a set of gloves looped around his neck as he collected the bets. I would look around, wish for better lighting, and then I’d take my robe off. I’d have my gold trunks on underneath. A few customers, drunk or sober, would begin to realize that they had done the wrong thing. But by that time things were in motion, the bets had already been made, and there was nothing to do but play it out.

  Don said that when I had won a hundred bar fights I could go to New York. He knew a promoter there to whom he sent his best fighters. Don, who was forty-four, trained only one fighter at a time. He himself hadn’t boxed in twenty years. Betty had made him promise, swear on all sorts of things, to stop once they got married. He had been very good, but he’d started seeing double after one fight, a fight he’d won but had been knocked down in three times, and he still saw double, twenty years later, whenever he got tired.

  We’d leave the bar with the money tucked into a cigar box. In the summer there might be fog or a light mist falling, and Don would hold my robe over Bettys head to keep her dry as we hurried away. We used the old beat-up truck so that when the drunks, angry that their fighter had lost, came out to the parking lot, throwing bottles and rocks at us as we drove away, it wouldn’t matter too much if they hit it.

  Whenever we talked about the fights, after they were over, Don always used words like “us,” “we,” and “ours.” My parents thought fighting was the worst thing a person could do, and so I liked the way Don said “we”: it sounded as though I wasn’t misbehaving all by myself.

  “How’d it go?” Jason would ask.

  “We smoked em,” Don would say. “We had a straight counterpuncher, a good man, but we kept our gloves up, worked on his body, and then got him with an overhand right. He didn’t know what hit him. When he came to, he wanted to check our gloves to see if we had put lead in them.”

  Jason would squeal, smack his forehead, and wish that he’d been old enough to see the bout for himself.

  We’d put the dogs, black-and-tan pups, in the back of the truck. The faithful Homer, frantic at having been separated from me, usually scrambled around, howling and pawing but fat Ann curled up on a burlap sack and quickly fell asleep. We’d go out for pizza then, or to a drive-through hamburger place, and we’d talk about the fight as we waited for our order. We counted the money to make sure it was all there, though if it wasn’t, we sure weren’t going back after it.

  We could tell just by looking at the outside what a place was going to be like, if it was the kind of place where we would have to leave Betty in the truck with Jason, sometimes with the engine running, and where we didn’t know for sure if we would win or lose.

  We looked for the backwoods night spots, more gathering places than bars, which were frequented by huge, angry men—men who either worked hard for a living and hated their jobs or did not work and hated that too, or who hated everything, usually beginning with some small incident a long time ago. These were the kinds of men we wanted to find, because they presented as much of a challenge as did any pro fighter.

  Some nights we didn’t find the right kind of bar until almost midnight, and during the lull Betty would fall asleep with her head in Dons lap and Jason would drive so I could rest; the dogs curled up on the floorboard. Finally, though, there would be the glow of lights in the fog, the crunch of a crushed-shell parking lot beneath our tires, and the cinder-block tavern, sometimes near the Alabama state line and set back in the woods, with loud music coming through the doors, seeping through the roof and into the night; between songs we could hear the clack of pool balls. When we went in the front door, the noise would come upon us like a wild dog. It was a furious caged sound, and we’d feel a little fear in our hearts. Hostility, the smell of beer, and anger would swallow us up. It would be just perfect.

  “We’ll be out in a while,” Don would tell Jason. “Pistol’s in the glove box. Leave the engine running. Watch after your mother.”

  We kept a tag hanging from the truck’s rear-view mirror that told us how many fights in a row we had won, what the magic number was, and after each fight it was Jason’s job to take down the old tag and put a new one up.

  Eighty-six. Eighty-seven. Eighty-eight.

  Driving home, back to Dons little farm in the woods, Jason would turn the radio on and steer the truck with one hand, keeping the other arm on the seat beside him, like a farmer driving into town on a Saturday. He was a good driver. We kept rocking chairs in the back of the truck for the long drives, and sometimes after a fight Don and I would lean back in them and look up at the stars and the tops of big trees that formed tunnels over the lonely back roads. We’d whistle down the road as Jason drove hard, with the windows down and his mother asleep in the front.

  When a road dipped down into a creek bottom, the fog made it hard to see beyond the short beam of our headlights, as if we were underwater. The air was warm and sticky. Here Jason slowed slightly, but soon we’d be going fast again, driving sixty, seventy miles an hour into the hills, where the air was clean and cool, and the stars visible once more.

  I wondered what it would be like to drive my father and mother around like that, to be able to do something for them, something right. My parents lived in Chicka-say, Oklahoma, and raised cattle and owned a store. I was twenty years old.

  I wanted to win the one hundred fights and go to New York and turn pro and send my parents money. Don got to keep all of the bar-fight money, and he was going to get to keep a quarter of the New York money, if there ever was any. I wanted to buy my parents a new house or some more cattle or something, the way I read other athletes did once they made it big. My childhood had been wonderful; already I was beginning to miss it, and I wanted to give them something in return.

  When I took the robe off and moved in on the bar fighter, there was Don and Betty and Jason to think of too. They were just making expenses, nothing more. I could not bear to think of letting them down. I did not know what my parents wanted from me, but I did know what Don and Jason and Betty wanted, so that made it easier, and after a while it became easier to pretend that it was all the same, that everyone wanted the same thing, and all I had to do was go out there and fight.

  Don had been a chemist once
for the coroner’s lab in Jackson. He knew about chemicals, drugs. He knew how to dope my blood, days before a fight, so I would feel clean and strong, a new man. He knew how to give me smelling salts, sniffs of ammonia vials broken under my nose when I was fighting sloppily, sniffs that made my eyes water and my nose and lungs burn, but it focused me. And even in training, Don would sometimes feint and spar without gloves and catch me off guard, going one way when I should have been going the other. He would slip in and clasp a chloroform handkerchief over my face. I’d see a mixed field of black and sparkling, night-rushing stars, and then I’d be down, collapsed in the pine needles by the lake where we did our sparring. I’d feel a delicious sense of rest, lying there, and I’d want to stay down forever, but I’d hear Don shouting, “...Three! Four! Five!” and I’d have to roll over, get my feet beneath me, and rise, stagger-kneed, the lake a hard glimmer of heat all around me. Don would be dancing around me like a demon, moving in and slapping me with that tremendous reach of his and then dancing back. I had to get my gloves up and stay up, had to follow the blur of him with that backdrop of deep woods and lake, with everything looking new and different suddenly, making no sense; and that, Don said, was what it was like to get knocked out. He wanted me to practice it occasionally, so that I would know what to do when it finally happened, in New York, or Philadelphia, or even in a bar.