In the Loyal Mountains

by Rick Bass

  We run around in large circles before entering open water, to iron out the engine’s kinks before we get too far from shore. Sure enough, the engine cuts out, just as the sun is completely up, brilliant and golden in our eyes, and the strong salt wind is in our faces.

  We sit like fools for a while, too far from shore to wade or swim back—the water is four to six feet deep throughout the bay, but the current is strong. Kirby and I, out of old habit, begin to despair and open bottles of beer. Jack, though, is still riding the crest of being captain, and the change in him is still evident, even from the set of his jaw. He lifts the cover of the engine and spies the problem immediately: the wire leading from one of the spark plugs is bare and wet from the storm, and has shorted out. Jack has some electrical tape in his toolbox, and he wraps the offending wire quickly.

  I don’t mean to make Jack look like such a genius. The reason he was able to go straight to the problem is that he and Kirby had taken Jack’s seventy-nine-year-old father out in the boat the week before, and the old man, a perfectionist, had ranted and raved for the first hour of the trip about the terrible condition Jack had let the boat fall into. Evidently the boat had belonged to Jack’s father fifteen or twenty years ago, and the old man’s loopy hearing had picked up on the spark-plug wire’s shorting right away.

  “He was really howling,” Kirby says of Jack’s father. “Man, is he a hardass.”

  Chastened by the memory, Captain Jack slouches a little lower in the seat. Something is troubling him now; his face looks like it did when he was driving through the rain.

  “Dollar-bill green!” he shouts, looking down at the water we’re skimming across. I’m sitting up in the high-perched bow like a mascot, sniffing the sea. “When the water’s this color and the wind’s out of the southeast,” Jack says, “you’ll catch fish.”

  Kirby moves up to the bow with me, still drinking his beer, and tries to fill me in as quickly as possible on all the things I should know, all the things he and Jack have learned from fishing together for the last five or six years.

  “There’s dolphins out here, but you never catch them,” Kirby says. “They only follow you. Sometimes they come right up to the boat and stick their head out of the water and look you in the eye. A lot of times you can tell where the speckled trout are by the way the seagulls are acting. In warm weather, the summer usually, you can look for slicks. A slick is an oily, flat spot on the water where the fish have gotten into a feeding frenzy on the shrimp and have eaten so much they’ve regurgitated it, and all the oils and digestive juices make this big slick on the ocean. It smells like watermelon. You smell watermelon out at sea and you’d better be ready.”

  “We may run aground,” Jack shouts from the back. “Be careful.” I picture us sliding to an immediate stop, beached by a barely submerged sandbar. I picture myself not stopping but being catapulted out of the boat, a human cannonball, and I sit a little lower in the bow and grip the sides.

  It all looks the same to me. I can’t see the shore anymore, can’t see where any sandbars might be that could cause us to run aground, though I keep watching. We bounce across the chops of waves a little longer—seemingly by whim, with no plan, no landmark, and then Jack cuts the engine, and we’re adrift.

  The silence sounds wonderful. “Start fishing,” Jack says. He is already scrambling like a child, eager to get his lure—an artificial shrimp, blood red (“strawberry”) in color—threaded onto a quarter-ounce jig and into the water. It’s a big deal, I find out, to catch the first fish of the day.

  “We bought Kirby her first pair of shoes this week,” Kirby says, once he has his rod set up and is working it, casting, retrieving, casting again. There’s high anticipation among us—any one of us could catch the first fish at any given second, even me. “Man, was she mad!” Kirby laughs, remembering. “She kicked and waved, trying to throw them off.” He’s been a father for seven months.

  Jack’s silent, intense, almost manic. It’s a lovely day. The sun is warm on our shoulders, though just off to our left, where land is, we can see the black squall line—savage thunderstorms, wicked cold streaks of lightning. Also coming from that direction, far in the distance, is a line of boats raising big wakes, bearing down like a posse.

  “The popdicks,” Kirby grunts.

  “You got any popdicks in Montana?” Jack asks, glancing in the direction of the oncoming boats.

  “Say what?” I ask.

  “Popdicks,” Jack says. He’s watching his line again, reeling it in. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone as serious about anything as Jack is about catching that first fish.

  “What’s a popdick?” I say. I’m almost afraid to ask. Kirby and Jack howl, delighted to hear me say the word. It’s a private joke between them, some word they’ve made up, and I feel as if I’ve crossed a magical boundary and been initiated into something important. Suddenly I feel farther away than ever from Margie.

  “Popdicks,” Kirby says, “run their boats across the water in front of you, going too fast, and they scare all the fish away.”

  Just then Jack’s rod bows. He’s got a big one, the first saltwater fish I’ve ever seen caught. Only I haven’t seen it yet. It’s still out there in the bay, fighting to get free. But Jack’s bringing it in, and Kirby clambers about the boat trying to get the landing net ready. Presently we see flashes of silver, like underwater lightning, then Kirby has the net under the big fish, a club-length speckled trout, fierce-toothed, metallic gray with a yellow and white belly and smart eyes. Jack quickly unhooks the fish and slides it into the ice chest, where it thrashes and beats its tail against the sides—a sound we pretend not to hear, or rather, understand.

  “Easy, big fella,” Jack says, readjusting his strawberry shrimp; it’s been half pulled off, like a woman coming out of her slip, and he slides it all the way back on the hook. We can’t cast out again, though, because by now all the popdicks have converged in a rough circle around us. They are casting shamelessly into the school of speckled trout that was ours first. They’re catching them and hooting with joy and excitement, as if they’ve done something special.

  “I’d rather be dead than be a popdick,” Jack mutters, and gives the old boat its full throttle, gunning us through the center of the schooling trout. Several fish leap out of the water, bright and glittering in the sun, and then we’re past the ranks of the popdicks, running again for the open sea.

  In the afternoon Jack finds another school, and both he and Kirby hook a trout on the same retrieve. There are a few other boats following roughly the same drift line as we are, but they aren’t close enough to see our poles, and if we’re careful, we can keep the fish a secret.

  “This is how you do it when the popdicks are watching,” Jack says, speaking through his teeth like a ventriloquist and holding the rod down low to the water, reeling in nonchalantly, as if nothing were happening. I see that Kirby is doing the same thing. They land the fish quietly, without the net and around the back side of the boat, so that it looks like we are getting beer out of the ice chest.

  I’m not getting any strikes. Jack and Kirby try to give me pointers as they fish, but it’s hard to fish and teach at the same time. Like most things, it’s just something that I am going to have to work out by myself. They each catch two more fish before the popdicks realize what’s going on and start their engines and come racing over.

  “Hey, you popdicks!” Kirby shouts when he sees the secret is out. He holds the bent pole high in the air with one hand. The fish that is on the other end struggles and dives, and with his other hand he begins waving the boats over. “Hey everybody, come on over here! I’m catching em! Hey, come on!”

  Jack curses, shaking his head, as if disciplining himself to say nothing—I can tell he hates scenes—but Kirby is giggling, and we leave the spot in a full spray just as the first of the boats arrive, friendly and curious, shameless, looking for fish.

  After that we go far inland, past the point where anyone can possibly see us. I
n the shallower water we begin catching hook-jawed flounder and gulf trout. Jack catches a fair-sized redfish—a big, dull-looking, bullheaded fish that keeps its mouth open all the time, and which, before being landed, with its great strength runs around and around the boat, circling it like a shark five or six times before tiring. Kirby has a tube of some magic fish-catching attractant that he wasted three dollars on at a sporting-goods store in Houston. “Kawanee” is the magical name Kirby and Jack have given to it, and after several more beers, and with the ice chest beginning to fill with fish (fish for dinner, fish for the freezer, and fish for their wives), we grow slightly goofy, and Kirby insists on smearing my lure—still a strawberry shrimp, which is what is working for them—with Kawanee before each cast. I still haven’t caught a single fish.

  There is the requisite talk of sex.

  “You know, Jack, when your assistant leans over me in the dentist’s chair, I can see her bosoms,” Kirby says. “I mean, I can really see them, even the tips.”

  “No shit,” Jack says, nursing a beer. There is a slack spot in the fishing, perhaps because we have all put Kawanee on our lures. It is a waxy, greasy substance like Chap Stick, and it smells like something dead. “No shit,” Jack says again, perhaps imagining it. Then he says, “Well, that’s fine, but you can’t look at things like that anymore. You’re married. Hell, you’re even a father.”

  “Yeah, but I’m still a wild sonofabitch,” Kirby says, and he sounds almost angry.

  The wind out of the southeast is warm and salty. It’s blowing us toward shore. The tide, too, has turned and is running back in—we can drift all the way to where we came from.

  “Wendy’s mean,” Jack says, picking up another bottle, “but she’s a hellcat in bed. Thank goodness.”

  Kirby just grunts. I can tell he isn’t going to bring Tricia into this, and I’m not about to bring Margie into this either. I don’t really want to hear about Wendy, don’t want to picture her being a hellcat. Maybe someone else, maybe even Jack’s dental assistant, but not his wife. I don’t want to hear about that, and I don’t think Kirby does either.

  We drift like that, fishing slowly and drinking beer, with a dark purple cloud bank hanging over the shore.

  “I can’t get over how upset your old man was about those spark-plug wires,” Kirby says. “I thought he was going to blow a clot. Do you know how happy he was to be able to really rip into you? He’ll be talking about it for the rest of his life. He’ll never stop.”

  “Aw, that’s okay,” Jack says, sighing. “I know he’s losing his mind, but he’s still my dad. I guess I can put up with it for a few more years. We’ll be dopey old fuckers ourselves someday.”

  “I hope so,” Kirby says.

  We are close enough to shore that I can see the billboard of Renee Jackson again. We drift toward her lazily.

  “She’s been missing for a long time, hasn’t she?” Kirby asks Jack.

  “I think so,” Jack says. “But I think they found her. I think that’s the one whose skeleton they found over on East Beach last spring.”

  We have to look at her as we drift in. There is nowhere else to look but straight at her, and she’s looking back at us, smiling. It is that point in the day—and always, each day, whether you are two blocks or two continents away, you feel it—when you are too far away from your wife, your family—cut loose, cast off, drifting away—and when you wish so strongly that you could see them again, could reach out and hold their hands. We drift near the boat launch, maneuvering the last several yards with the motor, suddenly tired from our day. Kirby hops out and gets the jeep and trailer, lowers it into the water so we can drive the boat up on it. We hook the cable winch up to it and reel it in, ready to go home.

  I know what Margie meant about feeling tired. I am tired too. But we have to keep going on.

  It is about four-thirty in the afternoon. Jack stops along a deserted stretch of beach on the way home—splatters of rain beginning to strike our faces, another storm starting up—and he asks Kirby and me to help him carry the steel box from the back of the jeep down to the dunes.

  I’d forgotten about it, but as soon as we lift it, it becomes apparent that there is something alive in the box after all, something spitting and snarling, and we set it down in the tall salt grass and then step back.

  “I trapped it in my back yard,” Jack says proudly. “I really did.”

  The gulf wind stings our faces with salt mist blowing off the waves. But it is a warm wind. The beach, at high tide, is a long, narrow strip of tan. The sky is a lurid purple-black, like the bruise on the inside of a woman’s thigh. We can see condominiums and high-rises farther down the beach. Lightning crackles and speaks all around us.

  “Let her rip,” Jack says, opening the door to the metal box. A small coyote about the size of a collie shoots out without looking back and begins running down the beach in a straight line. It is running with its tail floating behind, running—and this is the most beautiful thing—directly toward the condominiums and townhouses, running north and into the wind, without looking back, as if it knows exactly where it is going.

  Days of Heaven

  THEIR PLANS were to develop the valley, and my plans were to stop them. There were just the two of them. The stockbroker, or stock analyst, had hired me as caretaker on his ranch here. He was from New York, a big man who drank too much. His name was Quentin, and he had a protruding belly and a small mustache and looked like a polar bear. The other one, a realtor from Billings, was named Zim. Zim had close-together eyes, pinpoints in his pasty, puffy face, like raisins set in dough. He wore new jeans and a western shirt with silver buttons and a metal belt buckle with a horse on it. In his new cowboy boots he walked in little steps with his toes pointed in.

  The feeling I got from Quentin was that he was out here recovering from some kind of breakdown. And Zim—grinning, loose-necked, giggling, pointy-toe walking all the time, looking like an infant who’d just shit his diapers—Zim the predator, had just the piece of Big Sky Quentin needed. I’ll go ahead and say it right now so nobody gets the wrong idea: I didn’t like Zim.

  It was going fast, the Big Sky was, Zim said. All sorts of famous people—celebrities—were vacationing here, moving here. “Brooke Shields,” he said. “Rich people. I mean really rich people. You could sell them things. Say you owned the little store in this valley, the Mercantile. And say Michael Jackson—well, no, not him—say Kirk Douglas lives ten miles down the road. What’s he going to do when he’s having a party and realizes he doesn’t have enough Dom Perignon? Who’s he gonna call? He’ll call your store, if you have such a service. Say the bottle costs seventy-five dollars. You’ll sell it to him for a hundred. You’ll deliver it, you’ll drive that ten miles up the road to take it to him, and he’ll be glad to pay that extra money.

  “Bing-bang-bim-bam!” Zim said, snapping his fingers and rubbing his hands together, his raisin eyes glittering. His mouth was small, round, and pale, like an anus. “You’ve made twenty-five dollars,” he said, and the mouth broke into a grin.

  What’s twenty-five dollars to a stock analyst? But I saw that Quentin was listening closely.

  I’ve lived on this ranch for four years now. The guy who used to own it before Quentin was a predator too. A rough guy from Australia, he had put his life savings into building this mansion, this fortress, deep in the woods overlooking a big meadow. The mansion is three stories tall, rising into the trees like one of Tarzan’s haunts.

  The previous owner’s name was Beauregard. All over the property he had constructed various outbuildings related to the dismemberment of his quarry: smokehouses with wire screening, to keep the other predators out, and butchering houses complete with long wooden tables, sinks, and high-intensity lamps over the tables for night work. There were even huge windmill-type hoists on the property, which were used to lift the animals—moose, bear, and elk, their heads and necks limp in death—up off the ground so their hides could first be stripped, leaving the meat reveal
ed.

  It had been Beauregard’s life dream to be a hunting guide. He wanted rich people to pay him for killing a wild creature, one they could drag out of the woods and take home. Beauregard made a go of it for three years, before business went downhill and bad spirits set in and he got divorced. He had to put the place up for sale to make the alimony payments. The divorce settlement would in no way allow either of the parties to live in the mansion—it had to be both parties or none—and that’s where I came in: to caretake the place until it was sold. They’d sunk too much money into the mansion to leave it sitting idle out there in the forest, and Beauregard went back east, to Washington, D.C., where he got a job doing something for the CIA—tracking fugitives was my guess, or maybe even killing them. His wife went to California with the kids.

  Beauregard had been a mercenary for a while. He said the battles were usually fought at dawn and dusk, so sometimes in the middle of the day he’d been able to get away and go hunting. In the mansion, the dark, noble heads of long-ago beasts from all over the world—elephants, greater Thomson’s gazelles, giant oryx—lined the walls of the rooms. There was a giant gleaming sailfish leaping over the headboard of my bed upstairs, and there were wood-stoves and fireplaces, but no electricity. This place is so far into the middle of nowhere. After I took the caretaking position, the ex-wife sent postcards saying how much she enjoyed twenty-four-hour electricity and how she’d get up during the night and flick on a light switch, just for the hell of it.

  I felt that I was taking advantage of Beauregard, moving into his castle while he slaved away in D.C. But I’m a bit of a killer myself, in some ways, if you get right down to it, and if Beauregard’s hard luck was my good luck, well, I tried not to lose any sleep over it.

  If anything, I gained sleep over it, especially in the summer. I’d get up kind of late, eight or nine o’clock, and fix breakfast, feed my dogs, then go out on the porch and sit in the rocking chair and look out over the valley or read. Around noon I’d pack a lunch and go for a walk. I’d take the dogs with me, and a book, and we’d start up the trail behind the house, following the creek through the larch and cedar forest to the waterfall. Deer moved quietly through the heavy timber. Pileated woodpeckers banged away on some of the dead trees, going at it like cannons. In that place the sun rarely made it to the ground, stopping instead on all the various levels of leaves. I’d get to the waterfall and swim—so cold!—with the dogs, and then they’d nap in some ferns while I sat on a rock and read some more.