by Rick Bass
Roadrunners scurried across the road in front of our mad flight, and browsing herds of little deer leapt away from us in alarm, vaulting gently over barbed-wire fences and disappearing, with flagging white tails, into the thick tangled cedar. Hawks circled overhead, and vultures too. We headed for an obscure range that we knew about, a small chain of mountains in the central part of the state that was not even on the map: the Loyal Mountains.
A stream called Willow Creek flowed through the range, along which were many great boulders and sandbars and the huge, shady live oaks. Uncle Zorey drove across someone’s pasture, bouncing the truck over rocks and logs, still with his foot hanging out the window, and singing “Red River Valley.” We’d drive until we couldn’t go any farther, then get out and hike up the canyon, following the creek upstream to a cool spot we knew, where we could picnic, nap among sweet ferns, and go swimming in a pool beneath a small waterfall.
We’d stay until dark, drinking Jim Beam and shooting pistols—my uncle kept several in a tool chest in the truck. He’d lug the chest as though it were full of stolen gold while Spanda and I carried the ice chest. All three of us got unbelievably drunk. Spanda floated on her back in the pool, naked and sun-dappled beneath the canopy of oaks, her long hair floating all around her. Zorey sang and shot at the boulders, and the bullets ricocheted with mean, zinging whines. It was impossible to imagine what my father and mother would have thought, had they been able to see us.
“Yeah I’ve played the Red River Valley,” he would bray, “and sat in the kitchen and cried...”
The water was deep beneath the waterfall. Spanda and I would climb up onto the boulders above the pool, both of us naked now, and would practice our best dying-actor, shot-from-the-stagecoach falls while bullets flew around us. My uncle wasn’t drunk, so much as just crazy.
Later, too tired to drink any more and too tired to attempt the long drive back to Houston, we would check into a hotel in the nearest town. Uncle Zorey would give us some money for supper and the keys to his truck, then go off to his room, where he sat up in bed with all the lights on, watching television.
Spanda and I were always ravenous after the long afternoon of play, and the drinking. With the alcohol beginning to lose its edge, we’d eat barbecue, then go back to our room as if we were adults, as if we were married—as if we had all of life figured out—and make love on and off through the night, falling into it as if diving from one of those boulders. Now that I am older and have seen more, I realize, sadly, that it was more of a dutifulness with which Spanda moved, there in the dark.
But sometimes I awakened from sleep and she would have the covers pulled back. She’d be sitting up in the bed, looking at my leg. I caught her doing this several times, and at first I was flattered, and felt special. When it happened more and more, it began to trouble me a little. Thoughts would come into my head about Spanda, and where she had come from, but they went away, or I put them away.
In these hotel rooms, right after I made love to Spanda and was about to fall asleep, I could hear the TV next door in my uncle’s room. I heard the sound of the news, usually, and then my uncle’s voice, talking to the person on the television. He would argue with the weatherman about the forecast, or with the sportscaster about the replay of a close play at the plate.
Once, as I lay there listening, I heard the sportscaster talking about a golf tournament, the one my father was in, and I heard my fathers name mentioned. Spanda was already asleep, and I sat up to hear better, but my uncle must have gotten up then and turned the set off. I felt bad not knowing whether my father was winning or losing.
I never asked Spanda over for any of the dinners at my house. I knew better than to even mention her to my parents. “Pass the lucking meat loaf, please,” I could hear her saying after a glass or two of wine. I could see her getting up from her chair, coming over and sitting in my lap, and putting her tongue in my ear. These were the thoughts I had then, though I realize now that she probably would have been charming—and so I wish we had invited her, even once, just so she could have heard my mothers stories.
“My sisters and I had a pet Brahma bull named Skippy,” my mother said. “Every year we got to ride him to school, on the last day of school. He was so tame, so gentle.”
My uncle would listen with exceptional interest—with a hunger.
“In the winter we used to hook him up to a harness and use him to pull people’s cars out of the snow, after they slid off into the ditches,” my mother said.
My father laughed. “We used to use Zorey,” he said. “Zorey lifted up the back ends of cars and trucks that were stuck.”
My uncle smiled modestly. “Those days are over now, I guess.” He looked down at the table.
“They certainly are,” my father agreed. He held his big hands out in front of him, strong hands. Arthritis was already beginning to set in, and he had only three or four more years of golfing left, of being good at it.
My mother poured us each another glass of wine. It sparkled in the light of the chandelier. We toasted to the future.
My mother and father were not home much that summer. I feel now almost as if I aggravated my uncle’s condition, though I know he enjoyed watching me, and influencing me. When he could not travel to the Loyal Mountains, but instead had to stay in Houston for business meetings, he would take us in the evenings to the fanciest restaurants in the city. He’d buy Spanda a new dress and give me money to rent a tuxedo. I’d have the tuxedo shop pin up the cuff of my left leg, and we would go out to dinner and to a baseball game afterward, still wearing our tuxedos, Spanda still in her evening dress.
Some nights we would drive out to the county airport where Zorey kept his plane, out west of town, in the flat rice country. We’d park and walk over to Zorey’s small red and white Cessna. He didn’t keep it in a hangar, but simply tied it down to eye bolts set in the ground, so the plane seemed more like a tethered animal. He would run his hands over the plane, feeling its smooth surface, the coolness of the metal. A few times he asked if we wanted a ride. I always did, so we’d get in, and he would start the engine. The engine would catch, cough, and roar, and the little lights on the instrument panel would come on, illuminating my uncle’s face with an eerie green light. My uncle would be transfixed, serious as never before.
Spanda crouched on the floor in back, terrified but trying not to show it, one hand gripping my uncle’s seat, the other clutching my seat, for it was only a two-seat plane and I was the copilot. I think she felt very strongly that this was not part of her duty, and its possible that this, unlike anything else, was the part she did for love, if indeed there was any. Then we were spinning, turning toward the runway, lumbering across the grass—my uncle paid no attention to the paved taxiway. The moon shone down on the runway, making it look wet and shiny, like the beginning of a newer, finer, more glorious life, something inviting. Then the best part, putting the throttle in all the way.
My uncle was a good pilot, and it was hard to tell when we had left the ground. Once up above the airport, we could see the lights of the city to the east, but always we would bank and turn back into the darkness, away from the disorientation of all those streams of light and the silhouettes of tall buildings. We’d fly above the prairie, circling in the dark over the rice fields. It might seem that he would be a wild pilot, prone to doing loops and barrel rolls and figure eights, whether he had been drinking or not, but up in the air, with everything at stake, he was the picture of calm, the picture of my father, even: responsible, cool, and caring.
The little plane’s loud roar forced us to shout to each other whenever we wanted to say something. Mostly, though, we looked back at the city and at the darkness below us. Sometimes, feeling chivalrous, I held Spanda’s hand, squeezed it, and she would smile weakly in the greenish light.
We’d land when the gas gauge showed less than half empty. We tied the plane down and listened to the engine tick as it cooled in the night. Farther off, we heard crickets and the sound
of the interstate. Driving home, with the radio playing, my uncle would be as calm as a mare, would not sing along with any of the songs, would not backtalk any commercials that came on. He was thinking about something else, and he looked tame, like someone else.
His plant was on the way to his house, and we would often stop there and drive through the chain link gate, putting a card in a slot that automatically opened the gate. My uncle parked in the lot and got out of the truck to look at the frozen steel and iron machines lying silent in the night, big floodlights all around the yard. I did not understand how anyone could do this for a living, did not even understand how such boring-looking steel machines could make smoney, or be worth anything.
In August, during the worst of the heat, Uncle Zorey discovered that he had gout. He took medications for it, and had to stay off his feet. He got an electric wheelchair so he could continue to work, and that was when Spanda and I began to drive him around. We headed up into the Loyal Mountains every chance we got.
My uncle was a poor patient, and refused to change his diet. He rode in the passenger’s seat, with Spanda sitting between us, her legs on either side of the stick shift. She had to be careful not to bump his foot with hers, because it would cause him intense pain. He was in pain anyway, and was trying to suffer it silently, but he was not as good at it as was my father. He bellowed whenever we hit a bump, and would immediately take a swallow of whiskey or shake down a few of the pills he was taking.
He rode with a shotgun in his lap and would shoot at the coveys of quail we often saw huddled along the road, bathing in the dust. If he killed any, he would have me go back and pick them up. He’d clean them in the truck as I headed for the Loyals. Spanda sat grim-lipped, looking straight ahead, out the window. Feathers swirled around the truck as he plucked the birds, putting the entrails and feathers in a brown grocery bag that he had brought for that purpose. The insides of quail smell rotten for some reason, even when freshly killed, and we had to drive with the windows down in order to breathe.
Wherever we stopped for the night, Zorey would cook the quail in his hotel room, over cans of Sterno he’d bought at a convenience store. He skewered the birds on a coat hanger and cooked them for an after-dinner snack, basted with butter and pepper, as he watched the news and Spanda and I thumped around next door.
Mornings in the hill country were, and still are, beautiful—a heavy dew, even in the summer, and the sounds of roosters, and of cattle lowing. As his gout got worse, my uncle could not make it to the picnic spot anymore, so Spanda and I would go by ourselves. My uncle insisted on this, and he stayed in the hotel room with a six-pack of beer. When we returned, he would have stacks of paper spread out over the desk and the bed—papers everywhere, frantic-looking, and an adding machine plugged in, and the bottles of pills, and the Jim Beam half gone. I could tell that the accountants’ inquiries and all the other loose ends were troubling my uncle, and I wished there was something I could do to help him. I wished I knew about numbers, knew how to line them up so they all made sense. I wanted to go back up into the Loyal Mountains with him, wanted to pass through the small towns with him and Spanda, and eat, and drink, and drive the back roads.
It was raining when the news came that my uncle had shot himself. We were all three at home, my mother, my father, and I. I wanted the news—a phone call—to be taken back, to go away somehow. My father wilted and sat down on the couch. His face was ashen. It was as if he weren’t my father anymore, as if he weren’t anyone anymore—as if he’d had his identity taken away—and I felt that I had betrayed him somehow.
My father had his head in his hands. “I need to be alone,” he said.
“No, you don’t,” my mother said. She came over and sat down by his side. I did not know what to do or where to go. I stood there and watched them sitting on the couch together.
“We should have seen it coming,” my father said, “should have seen it coming like a freight train.” He was shaking his head, and my mother’s arms were around him.
“No,” she said. “No.”
After a long while my father’s color started to come back. He stood up and said to us, “I have to go identify the body now.” I thought what an awful task that would be. It would be like looking at himself, and worse, there would be the guilt.
“Do you want me to come?” my mother asked. She looked over at me. “Do you want us to come?”
“No,” my father said. “I will be all right.”
My father is retired now, and a grandfather. His back still hurts him, but he is silent about it, as ever. My mother still tells us stories about her family and her childhood, but there’s a loneliness, and the stories are not devoured with as much eagerness—can never be devoured with as much eagerness as they once were by my uncle. On my dresser I have a picture of my father from twenty years ago. It is from a golf tournament, and he is wearing the winners jacket—the victor.
What lies ahead? Sam, my son, is strong, and prone to tempers. Sometimes, knowing the past—and not knowing parts of it, too—I am frightened almost to the point of paralysis. Sam may become some kind of athlete. He is often sweet, but can throw horrible tantrums, or can turn distant and moody. He is only three years old, but when he reminds me of something, I overreact, and it is my wife who has to calm me.
“He is so strong,” I say. “Already, he’s so strong.”
Or when he’s crying, and has his fits, and turns his back on us—so cold, as if he doesn’t need us!—I panic, and it feels as if there is nothing I can do.
“Hold him,” my wife says when Sam grows distant, sometimes for no reason. She’s large with our second, coming soon, but she shows no fear, no worry, only a willingness to dive into the future.
She picks Sam up and hugs him tightly, holds him close to her, strokes the side of his face, and smiles at me.
“Hold him like this,” she says, rocking him and smiling at me. “Like this.”
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About the Author
RICK BASS’s fiction has received O. Henry Awards, numerous Pushcart Prizes, awards from the Texas Institute of Letters, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. Most recently, his memoir Why I Came West was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award.
