In the Loyal Mountains

by Rick Bass

My body hair was shaved before each fight. I’d sit on a chair by the lake in my shorts while the three of them, with razors and buckets of soapy water, shaved my legs, back, chest, and arms so the blows would slide away from me rather than cut in, and so I would move faster, or at least feel faster—that new feeling, the feeling of being someone else, newer, younger, and with a fresher start.

  When they had me all shaved, I would walk out on the dock and dive into the lake, plunging deep, ripping the water with my new slipperiness. I would swim a few easy strokes out to the middle, where I would tread water, feeling how unbelievably smooth I was, how free and unattached, and then I would swim back in. Some days, walking with Don and Betty and Jason back to the house, my hair slicked back and dripping, with the woods smelling good in the summer and the pine needles dry and warm beneath my bare feet—some days, then, with the lake behind me, and feeling changed, I could almost tell what it was that everyone wanted, which was nothing, and I was very happy.

  After our bar fights, we’d get home around two or three in the morning. I’d nap on the way, in the rocker in the back of the truck, rocking slightly, pleasantly, whenever we hit a bump. Between bumps I would half dream, with my robe wrapped tightly around me and the wind whipping my hair, relaxed dreams, cleansed dreams—but whenever I woke up and looked at Don, he would be awake.

  He’d be looking back at where we’d come from, the stars spread out behind us, the trees sliding behind our taillights, filling in behind us as if sealing off the road. Jason would be driving like a bat out of hell, with the windows down, and coffee cups and gum wrappers swirled around in the trucks cab.

  Sometimes Don turned his chair around to face the cab, looking in over Jason’s shoulder and watching him drive, watching his wife sleep. Don had been a good boxer but the headaches and double vision had gotten too bad. I wondered what it would take for me to stop. I could not imagine anything would. It was the only thing I could do well.

  On the long, narrow gravel road leading to Don’s farm, with the smell of honeysuckle and the calls of chuck-wills-widows, Jason slowed the truck and drove carefully, respecting the value of home and the sanctity of the place. At the crest of the hill he turned the engine and lights off and coasted the rest of the way to the house, pumping the squeaky brakes, and in silence we’d glide down the hill. From here the dogs could smell the lake. They scrambled to their feet, leapt over the sides of the truck, and raced to the water to inspect it and hunt for frogs.

  I slept in a little bunkhouse by the lake, a guest cottage they had built for their boxers. Their own place was up on the hill. It had a picnic table out front and a garage—it was a regular-looking house, a cabin. But I liked my cottage. I didn’t even have a phone. I had stopped telling my parents about the fights. There was not much else to tell them about other than the fights, but I tried to think of things that might interest them. Nights, after Don and Betty and Jason had gone to bed, I liked to swim to the middle of the lake, and with the moon burning bright above me, almost like a sun, I’d float on my back and fill my lungs with air. I’d float there for a long time.

  The dogs swam around me, loyal and panting, paddling in frantic but determined circles, sneezing water. I could feel the changing currents beneath and around me as the dogs stirred the water, and could see the wakes they made, glistening beneath the moon—oily-black and mint-white swirls. I loved the way they stayed with me, not knowing how to float and instead always paddling. I felt like I was their father or mother. I felt strangely like an old man, but with a young man’s health.

  I’d float like that until I felt ready again, until I felt as if I’d never won a fight in my life—in fact, as if I’d never even fought one, as if it was all new and I was just starting out and had everything still to prove. I floated there until I believed that that was how it really was.

  I was free then, and I would break for shore, swimming again in long, slow strokes. I’d get out and walk through the trees to my cottage with the dogs following, shaking water from their coats and rattling their collars, and I knew the air felt as cool on them as it did on me. We couldn’t see the stars, down in the trees like that, and it felt very safe.

  I’d walk through the woods, born again in my love for a thing, the hard passion of it, and I’d snap on my yellow porch light as I went into the cottage. The light seemed to pull in every moth in the county. Homer and Ann would stand on their hind legs and dance, snapping at the moths. Down at the lake the bullfrogs drummed all night, and from the woods came the sound of crickets and katydids. The noise was like that at a baseball game on a hot day, always some insistent noises above others, rising and falling. I could hear the dogs crunching June bugs as they caught them.

  Right before daylight Betty would ring a bell to wake me for breakfast. Don and I ate at the picnic table, a light breakfast, because we were about to run, me on foot and Don on horseback.

  “You’ll miss me when you get up to New York,” he said. “They’ll lock you in a gym and work on your technique. You’ll never see the light of day. But you’ll have to do it.”

  I did not want to leave Betty and Jason, did not even want to leave Don, despite the tough training sessions. It would be fun to fight in a real ring, with paying spectators, a canvas mat, a referee, and ropes, safety ropes to hold you in. I would not mind leaving the bar fights behind at all, but I could not tell Don about my fears. I was half horrified that a hundred wins in Mississippi would mean nothing, and that I would be unable to win even one fight in New York.

  Don said I was “a fighter, not a boxer.”

  He’d had other fighters who had gone on to New York, who had done well, who had won many fights. One of them, his best before me, Pig-Eye Reeves, had been ranked as high as fifth as a WBA heavyweight. Pig-Eye was a legend, and everywhere in Mississippi tales were told about him. Don knew all of them.

  Pig-Eye had swum in the lake I swam in, ate at the same picnic table, lived in my cottage. Pig-Eye had run the trails I ran daily, the ones Don chased me down, riding his big black stallion, Killer, and cracking his bullwhip.

  That was how we trained. After breakfast Don headed for the barn to saddle Killer, and I whistled the dogs up and started down toward the lake. The sun would be coming up on the other side of the woods, burning steam and mist off the lake, and the air slowly got clearer. I could pick out individual trees through the mist on the far side. I’d be walking, feeling good and healthy, at least briefly, as if I would never let anyone down. Then I would hear the horse running down the hill through the trees, coming after me, snorting, and I’d hear his hooves and the saddle creaking, with Don riding silently, posting. When he spotted me, he’d crack the whip once—that short mean pop!—and I would have to run.

  Don made me wear leg weights and wrist weights. The dogs, running beside me, thought it was a game. It was not. For punishment, when I didn’t run fast enough and Killer got too close to me, Don caught my shoulder with the tip of the whip. It cut a small strip into my sweaty back, which I could feel in the form of heat. I knew this meant nothing, because he was only doing it to protect me, to make me run faster, to keep me from being trampled by the horse.

  Don wore spurs, big Mexican rowels he’d bought in an antiques store, and he rode Killer hard. I left the trail sometimes, jumping over logs and dodging around trees and reversing my direction, but still Killer stayed with me, leaping the same logs, galloping through the same brush, though I was better at turning corners and could stay ahead of him that way.

  This would go on for an hour or so, until the sun was over the trees and the sky bright and warm. When Don figured the horse was getting too tired, too bloody from the spurs, he would shout “Swim!” and that meant it was over, and I could go into the lake.

  “The Lake of Peace!” Don roared, snapping the whip and spurring Killer, and the dogs and I splashed out into the shallows. I ran awkwardly, high-stepping the way you do going into the waves at the beach. I leaned forward and dropped into the warm water, felt the w
eeds brushing my knees. Killer was right behind us, still coming, but we would be swimming hard, the dogs whining and rolling their eyes back like Chinese dragons, paddling furiously, trying to see behind them. By now Killer was swimming too, blowing hard through his nostrils and grunting, much too close to us, trying to swim right over the top of us, but the dogs stayed with me, as if they thought they could protect me, and with the leg weights trying to weigh me down and pull me under, I’d near the deepest part of the lake, where the water turned cold.

  I swam to the dark cold center, and that was where the horse, frightened, slowed down, panicking at the water’s coldness and swimming in circles rather than pushing on. The chase was forgotten then, but the dogs and I kept swimming, with the other side of the lake drawing closer at last, and Jason and Betty standing on the shore, jumping and cheering. The water began to get shallow again, and I came crawling out of the lake. Betty handed me a towel, Jason dried off the dogs, and then we walked up the hill to the cabin for lunch, which was spread out on a checkered tablecloth and waiting for me as if there had never been any doubt that I would make it.

  Don would still be laboring in the water, shouting and cursing at the horse now, cracking the whip and giving him muted, underwater jabs with his spurs, trying to rein Killer out of the angry, confused circles he was still swimming, until finally, with his last breath, Killer recognized that the far shore was as good as the near one, and they’d make it in, struggling, twenty or thirty minutes behind the dogs and me.

  Killer would lie on his side, gasping, coughing up weeds, ribs rising and falling, and Don would come up the hill to join us for lunch: fried chicken, cream gravy, hot biscuits with honey, string beans from the garden, great wet chunks of watermelon, and a pitcher of iced tea for each of us. We ate shirtless, barefoot, and threw the rinds to the dogs, who wrestled and fought over them like wolves.

  At straight-up noon, the sun would press down through the trees, glinting off the Lake of Peace. We’d change into bathing suits, all of us, and inflate air mattresses and carry them down to the lake. We’d wade in up to our chests and float in the sun, our arms trailing loosely in the water. We’d nap as if stunned after the heavy meal, while the dogs whined and paced the shore, afraid we might not come back.

  Killer, still lying on the shore, would stare glassy-eyed at nothing, ribs still heaving. He would stay like that until mid-afternoon, when he would finally roll over and get to his feet, and then he would trot up the hill as if nothing had happened.

  We drifted all over the lake in our half stupor, our sated summer-day sleep. My parents wanted me to come home and take over the hardware store. But there was nothing in the world that could make me stop fighting. I wished that there was, because I liked the store, but that was simply how it was. I felt that if I could not fight, I might stop breathing, or I might go down: I imagined that it was like drowning, like floating in the lake, and then exhaling all my air, and sinking, and never being heard from again. I could not see myself ever giving up fighting, and I wondered how Don had done it.

  We floated and lazed, dreaming, each of us spinning out in different directions whenever a small breeze blew, eventually drifting farther and farther apart, but on the shore the dogs followed only me, tracking me around the lake, staying with me, whining for me to come back to shore.

  On these afternoons, following an especially good run and an exhausting swim, I would be unable to lift my arms. Nothing mattered in those suspended, floating times. This is how I can give up, I’d think. This is how I can never fight again. I can drop out, raise a family, and float in the bright sun all day, on the Lake of Peace. This is how I can do it, I’d think. Perhaps my son could be a boxer.

  Fights eighty-nine, ninety, ninety-one: I tore a guy’s jaw off in the Body Shop. I felt it give way and then detach, heard the ripping sound as if it came from somewhere else, and it was sickening—we left without any of the betting money, gave it all to his family for the hospital bill, but it certainly did not stop me from fighting, or even from hitting hard. I was very angry about something, but did not know what. I’d sit in the back of the truck on the rides home, and I’d know I wanted something, but did not know what.

  Sometimes Don had to lean forward and massage his temples, his head hurt so bad. He ate handfuls of aspirin, ate them like M&M’s, chasing them down with beer. I panicked when he did that, and thought he was dying. I wondered if that was where my anger came from, if I fought so wildly and viciously in an attempt, somehow and with no logic, to keep things from changing.

  On the nights we didn’t have a fight, we would spar a little in the barn. Killer watched us wild-eyed from his stall, waiting to get to me. Don made me throw a bucket of lake water on him each time I went into the barn, to make sure that his hate for me did not wane. Killer screamed whenever I did this, and Jason howled and blew into a noisemaker and banged two garbage can lids together, a deafening sound inside the barn. Killer screamed and reared on his hind legs and tried to break free. After sparring we went into the house, and Betty fixed us supper.

  We had grilled corn from Bettys garden and a huge porterhouse steak from a steer Don had slaughtered himself, and Lima beans and Irish potatoes, also from the garden. It felt like I was family. We ate at the picnic table as fog moved in from the woods, making the lake steamy. It was as if everyone could see what I was thinking then; my thoughts were bare and exposed, but it didn’t matter, because Don and Betty and Jason cared for me, and also because I was not going to fail.

  After dinner we watched old fight films. For a screen we used a bedsheet strung between two pine trees. Don set up the projector on the picnic table and used a crooked branch for a pointer. Some of the films were of past champions, but some were old movies of Don fighting. He could make the film go in slow motion, to show the combinations that led to knockdowns, and Betty always got up and left whenever we watched one of the old splintery films of Don’s fights. It wasn’t any fun for her, even though she knew he was going to win, or was going to get up again after going down.

  I had seen all of Don’s fights a hundred times and had watched all the films of the greatest fighters a thousand times, it seemed, and I was bored with it. Fighting is not films, it’s experience. I knew what to do and when to do it. I’d look past the bedsheet, past the flickering washes of light, while Jason and Don leaned forward, breathless, watching young Don stalk his victim, everything silent except for the clicking of the projector, the crickets, the frogs, and sometimes the owls. In the dark I wondered what New York was going to be like, if it was going to be anything like this.

  Some nights, after the movies had ended, we would talk about Pig-Eye Reeves. It had been several years ago, but even Jason remembered him. We were so familiar with the stories that it seemed to all of us—even to me, who had never met him—that we remembered him clearly.

  Pig-Eye knocked out one of the fighters Don had trained, in a bar up in the Delta one night, the Green Frog. That was how Don found Pig-Eye—he had beaten Dons challenger, had just stepped up out of the crowd. Dons fighter, whose name Don always pretended he couldn’t remember, threw the first punch, a wicked, winging right, not even bothering to set it up with a jab—Don says he covered his face with his hands and groaned, knowing what was going to happen. Pig-Eye, full of beer, was still able to duck it, evidently, because Don heard nothing but the rip of air and then, a little delayed, the sound of another glove hitting a nose, then a grunt, and the sound of a body falling in the sawdust.

  Don and Jason and Betty left the semiconscious fighter there in the Green Frog, with a broken nose and blood all over his chest and trunks. They drove home with no money and Pig-Eye.

  They changed the number on the truck mirror from whatever it had been before—forty-five or fifty—back to one. Pig-Eye had won one fight.

  “You just left your other fighter sitting there?” I asked the first time I heard the story, though I knew better than to ask now.

  Don had seemed confused by the questi
on. “He wasn’t my fighter anymore,” he said finally.

  Sometimes Jason would ask the question for me, so I didn’t have to, and I could pretend it didn’t matter, as if I weren’t even thinking about it.

  “Is Mack a better fighter than Pig-Eye?” he’d ask after watching the movies.

  Don answered like a trainer every time. He was wonderful, the best. “Mack is better than Pig-Eye ever dreamed of being,” he’d say, clapping a big hand on my neck and giving it the death squeeze, his hand the size of a license plate.

  “Tell him about the balloon,” Jason would cry when Don had reached a fever pitch for Pig-Eye stories.

  Don leaned back against a tree and smiled at his son. The lights were off in the house. Betty had gone to bed. Moths fluttered around the porch light, and down below us in the Lake of Peace, bullfrogs drummed. There was no other sound.

  “Pig-Eye won his last five fights down here with one hand tied behind his back,” Don said, closing his eyes. I wondered if I could do that, wondered if in fact I’d have to do that, to ride down the legend of Pig-Eye, and pass over it.

  “We sent him up to New York, to a promoter I knew”—Don looked at me quickly—“the same one we’ll be sending Mack to if he wins the rest of his fights. This promoter, Big Al Wilson, set him up in a penthouse in Manhattan, had all Pig-Eye’s meals catered to him. He had masseurs, everything. He was the champ. Everyone was excited about him.”

  “Tell him about the scars,” Jason said. He moved next to his dad, so that his back was against the same tree, and it was as if they were both telling me the story now, though I knew it already, we all knew it.

  “Pig-Eye had all these scars from his bar fights,” Don said. “He’d been in Vietnam too, and had got wounded there. He flew those crazy hot-air balloons for a hobby, once he started winning some fights and making some money, and he was always having rough landings, always crashing the balloons and getting cut up that way.”