The Watch

by Rick Bass

  We went by the hotel afterward, where Kirby’s bull-riding cousins were staying, to change out of our suits. To go to all the naked breast palaces. They were all in safe neighborhoods, the people who went to these things often wore ties, it was really amazing. Watching a film for the bachelor party would have been too lonely, too abject: the small screen, the sense of enclosure, in somebody’s house. Tricia tried to lock Kirby with a variety of doe-eyed looks of concern as we left the rehearsal dinner but it was dark and they didn’t carry the message that she wanted them to, I don’t think. He couldn’t really see her that well, and we were hurrying out.

  We ran for our cars and after quick consultation decided to all ram Gus’s truck at once, from all directions, on the great empty width of late-night Main Street beneath the tall street lamps, and I still and always will remember Gus’s grinning, manic face, our headlights reflecting off his moon-glasses, when he realized what was happening as we began turning our cars around, loops and squealing turns and circles, and headed back, converging on him. Someone was going to give him something.

  We knocked him silly, hit him from four directions at once, and with force. We couldn’t have been drunker. Gus rolled out of his truck and fell to the street, laughing tears, holding himself he was laughing so hard. Rocky screamed and jumped out of his truck and with his bare hands and kicks of his boots pulled Gus’s bent hood off the frame and hurled it noisily into the street. Tricia watched from the lobby with her hand over her mouth.

  It was just the beginning.

  We went into Caligula’s, stunned at first by the noise and flash of lights—and not by the women’s nakedness, or dancing, but by their smiles: they were truly happy. In fact, they were delighted; we’d never seen such exhilaration, such happy faces. We stood there and watched. A girl came and took us to a table. Her breasts were riding our elbows as she steered us through the crowd, she was touching us with them. Her nipples looked broad and like something we’d never seen before that close, and in that context. It was her face, her mouth, that we wanted to watch, though; there were plenty of breasts, all uncovered and all around us, with lights and motion—the noise, though, was what was so overpowering, and it made talk, and words, the rarest thing, the thing we wanted. We leaned closer to her, trying to hear what she was saying.

  There’s a false satiety that sets in in these places, but then the weight of its falseness, after a while, suddenly presses down and sharpens the hunger that was thought to be gone. We kept going outside where we could hear each other talk, and also just to keep reexperiencing the pleasure of coming back in.

  It seemed cool and fresh whenever we went back outside: it was invigorating.

  On about our third trip outside—Gus’s big glasses fogging up, coming out of the building’s air conditioning—a short sweating black girl in a purple wool miniskirt, barefooted, calves and thighs like a linebacker’s, approached us from nowhere, stopped halfway to us, then motioned us to the parking lot. She had warts on her face and on her arms.

  She was so ugly, so spellbinding, that we had to follow.

  She reached her car, an old copper-colored Ford Galaxie, with three other girls still in it, waiting—the engine was running, idling, for some reason—and the girls inside were all as dark as the night itself. She turned and put her hands behind her back, on the handle of the car door, and we could see her teeth moving, like semaphore, as she spoke. She was the ugliest woman on the face of the earth. Our town had created her. She was ours.

  “Ten dollar,” she said.

  Gus pulled out his wallet and began counting. It was hard to believe.

  It was taking forever. We looked out at the car. We could just see her head moving under the street light; Gus’s face was back in the shadows of the car and we couldn’t see him, and were glad, though we had to look.

  We went back in to watch the girls. They ran and jumped and did cheers, and slid up and down poles, wrapped their legs around them and mated with them. There must have been over a hundred of them. You think your girl’s breasts are the best in the world, just because they’re unique, and then you see a couple hundred of them at once, not any of them at all alike, and you know you are right, but in a lesser way. A bachelor party is a thing to survive, like so much else. I don’t think that other thing, with a girl in the back room, the girl without a face, just her legs up for you, is done any more. Too dangerous; too dangerous!

  We ordered the god-awfully expensive drinks, and watched the girls, and waited for Gus to come back in. Maybe, we thought hopefully, they were robbing him.

  Mostly it’s just drinking. Driving cars into each other, head-on, at twenty, thirty miles an hour, on empty, lamplit Main Street: the gold light coming down past the oaks, twinkling, spilling like haze at a football stadium. The crunch and tear of metal, the tinkle of glass, the laughs and cheers. Seeing who can make the biggest noise.

  I don’t know if this is a fact or not but in college a tame professor I had once, a real nerd, pushed his glasses up higher on his nose and told me, aiming the whole lecture at only me, it seemed—he stared at me the whole time, looking at no one else, and this was a large class—about this one species, which, it turned out, is kind of ridiculed in scientific circles because, according to the fossil record, this inept dinosaur was only able to cling to the earth for six million years, while even the most ignorant, backward, brainless sorts were lasting twenty, thirty, one hundred fifty million years. I can’t remember the professor’s name either.

  I think it was that dinosaur that was half bird and half reptile, one of those first ones to leap out of trees, thinking it could fly. The professor was laughing while he was telling us all this, picturing the scaled thing, eyes bright, scrabbling up a tree; going out on a limb, crouching and leaping, maybe trying to catch a wind current. Leaving the tree, and then striking the rocks, breaking itself. The thing didn’t have a mind, a brain; just a feeling. God knows what was in it that kept urging the species to do that, repeatedly. Climb the trees and leap. Trying to leave its environment, I guess, before times got tough. Which it did manage to do, in a way.

  That’s where you find all their fossils, too, or most of them: dozens and dozens, almost always in twisted shapes that are unnatural and broken, and painful even to look at, even trapped in old rock. You go out into the desert (said the professor) and in your dig, you try to find a fossil tree, the trunk of a big stout one, the equivalent, I suppose, of our live oaks today—a good jumping tree—and then from that, in your diggings, you radiate, work outward, and you start finding these little half-bird things, as many as you could ever care to collect. Half something, half another thing.

  Gus came back in with the inner happiness we knew he’d have; it was more than just a smile. He was in love with life. He had had the O in the ugly girl’s mouth. It made the girls sliding up and down on the poles suddenly seem like innocents, like maidens.

  Wedding parties, bachelors: how does the bride, eventually— over the tenure of her term, the length of the marriage—finally get all the pieces and fragments of what went on? Why does it matter? The fear in their eyes; the importance of it, to them, of a thing missed. They get a snatch of it here, pick up a tidbit the year after that; sometimes there’ll be a dinner party and great long stretches of the narrative will come out, after eleven-thirty, told charmingly, happily, among friends—Tricia will lean forward and be worried, she will be listening with concern . . .

  You weren’t trying to leave me, were you? Tricia’s eyes will say whenever the bachelor party is mentioned, whenever anyone’s is discussed. I’m the only thing that can hold you, her great wide eyes seem to say. I don’t want you going up into any trees. She looks like a mother on these occasions, looking at her child: she’s here to protect what matters. There’ll be a white tablecloth and candles. Kirby will be leaning back, sated. King Kirby. He’s always laughing, if he can help it. Something’s always funny now in his life. He’s found the right woman, and I don’t know what she sees in him,
what the purpose is, but she sees it.

  For some reason, I find Gus’s truck frightening. He came out of it the worst, the night of the party and, unlike us, he didn’t get his dents and crunches repaired, touched up or painted. He drives on with it the way it is, like some kind of barbarian, to whom nothing matters anymore. The hood was never put back on; when you ride with him, you can see pistons and everything.

  “I’m going to catch that damn fish of Kirby’s,” he tells me. He says it like he’s forgotten I’m Kirby’s best friend. I don’t know why I still go places with him occasionally. It’s so sad. I can’t bear to think of letting him know of my dread, of just the way he is. Gus isn’t going to last long. It’s like he has a cancer. It can happen to anyone; it’s the least I can do. Still, when I’m riding with him, listening to him babble, I feel like I’m holding my breath. At least he won’t last long. And I’m free; it’s different from when I was in college.

  The doves call so sweetly in our neighborhood, in Kirby’s and mine. It is taking us no time at all to become snobs on how to live. It’s happening easier than anything.

  “Thanks for the ride, Gus,” I tell him when he lets me out. I don’t have a car. His tattered truck is shaking abjectly, like an old dog, and blue smoke is coming out of it from several places, as if through perforations, the kind you’d see in a block of Swiss cheese.

  Gus looks grim and wild and alone, sweating behind his glasses, as wild as Rocky, as he prepares to go back to his trailer, his hovel, the one where we all used to be. He knows Kirby and Tricia and I go down to Mexico together all the time.

  “Adios!” he cries, still grim, and roars off, the bomber, a ninety-mile drive ahead of him, smoke pouring from behind, as if he is mortally hit. A man so lonely. He wants to stay and try to change his life, to be a different, more accepted person. Maybe he wants to be Kirby. Maybe he wants to be me.

  Kirby isn’t home, and neither is Trish, so I put a note on their door and ask them to come over for margaritas if they get in soon enough. I go home and plug the blender in, get everything ready. But they don’t show; they don’t get in, I suppose, until late. They also have their own lives to live. We have all these distances set out before us, and we can do what we want with them, our lives. We are all in perfect and proper control. We can make happen what we want to happen, in our lives, and there is all the time in the world.

  Sometimes I go for walks early in the morning. Some of the professional people are leaving in their black cars. Audis. Benzes. Quiet. Everyone in Houston in 1986 has tinted their windows a solid black. You can disappear inside. You can blow the air conditioner on 3-Maximum, and listen to whatever tape you want to, its chrominess hissing nicely, and look out at breasts, at faces, at women, at old men, at the ones who have only a few years left to be alive.

  I walk barefooted and in my shorts, without a shirt, in the cool dust that collects in the street gutters from the rains and winds, and doves fly from high in the pines; sometimes a housewife will come out, down her walk to get the paper, and she will wave. I know I must look young to all of them. The sun in our neighborhood, our woods, is odd, because it is as orange in the early morning, coming through the fog, as it is at sunset, when it is going down behind all the heated particles of haze and smog. Such real beauty.

  Sometimes, I’ll walk by K’s house. If he is out with Tricia by the pool, reading the papers, having a cup of coffee, sharing mirth over the price of oil while the city collapses, and he sees me and waves me up, I’ll go up: sit and have a cup. Maybe swim some, a few easy laps and lazy, and have Tricia get me a towel. They’ve got the nicest towels: the cream color of luxury, wedding gifts, they weigh about five or six pounds each and are wickedly rough; you can really get dry, and feel ready to face the rigors of the day.

  I like the way the water feels, too, when I get out of the pool, the way it slips down my calves, around and behind to the insides, down over the heels, splattering. Maybe I’m a sensualist, and no good at moving forward, at climbing those trees—or, rather, at leaping—maybe I’ll never be able to go anywhere on my own or do anything—that’s what a friend of Tricia’s said, one horrible occasion when a double date was accidentally created—we went to a drive-in movie, if you can believe it: twenty-six years old, all of us, and our first, ever. There were mosquitoes, and the night was muggy, we had to roll the windows up and run the air conditioner, idle the engine, and just watch, without hearing the voices ... we left after about thirty minutes and went to the Cadillac and drank—that was when Tricia’s friend so very helpfully volunteered what was wrong with me—

  —but there’s time. You can learn from everybody else’s mistakes; isn’t that the best way? You can stay off the field, on the sidelines, and spare yourself the crunch of gristle, crack of bone.

  Shack catches most of her minnows, and her five-cent goldfish, in the deep. Rarely does she come to the surface. Just a bolt of movement, green far below and large, and then back she goes, into the car: a fish is gone, a shiner, a minnow; a sloppy, lazy perch.

  Maybe there will be a bad hatch of mosquitoes one day. A thunderstorm. Perhaps the Astros lose. We go to Mexico. The flights cost seventy-nine dollars, one way.

  When we get there, Kirby loves to practice his Spanish. Sometimes, when he means to say to the cab driver, Take me to the bullfights,” it will instead come out “I have a cat in my house”— said with a great and mysterious pride, his eyes closed even, so pleased is he with his mastery of the language—but we’ve got a book too, and we’re learning. This fall I may get a job down at one of the nurseries, because I’ll be running out of money, but also because it would give me a good chance to learn the words: working with Mexican laborers, aliens. It’ll be embarrassing to sweat so much, though. I’ve watched them, and none of them sweat. They know, down in Mexico, how to work without getting hot. They pace themselves. I’ve watched everything.

  August. The hurricane season. We’ve been down in Laredo, and Nuevo Laredo, for a week. We drove, this time, in Kirby’s jeep. We bet on the horses, on the dogs, and went to the bullfights. We drank margaritas as often as we could stand it, and then some. We drove deep into the poor country, broken and cracked and roads turning to dust, children without clothes, a cantina only every thirty miles, and we bought Coronas for a quarter, a dime, then a nickel, as we got closer to the source. We lay out in the sun and sunbathed. It wasn’t like our old lives, when we were in school, and with Gus: we were doing something. We had a good time and came back with many pounds of cheap Mexican coffee, all flavors, a lime squeezer, some piñatas, and cases and cases of Corona, smuggled: a simple blanket over them, there was no check.

  It was different when we got back into Texas, we could tell that it was. We drove for great stretches, and didn’t say much. Our faces and arms were as dark as animals’. Our lips were blistered— we drank a good deal of water. Whoever wasn’t driving almost always slept. We drove 70, 75, 80 miles an hour.

  It was dark when we reached Houston: there’s no tiredness greater than that of driving all day, with a sunburn, after a vacation. The lights of the restaurants and streaming blurs of car headlights assaulted us, disoriented us. In Mexico, one of the matadors had gotten gored, twice: first in the calf, dropping and turning to reach for it, the pain; and then in his back. We saw the horn come out the other side. It appeared, the end of it a small thing, in his stomach. We drank a lot of beers that afternoon after the fights. We drank all we could. We wanted to know the language, so we could find out if he had lived.

  The lights were on at both our houses when we got in: we’ve got those automatic timers. We pulled up into Kirby’s drive first, to check on Shack. I was going to help Kirby unload all the beer. Tricia was going to go upstairs into the bedroom, into the air conditioning, to sleep: her head hurt.

  There were some kids on the patio, by the pool, and they had fishing poles. The climbing turn of our headlights coming up the drive caught them, froze them like rabbits.

  “Shit,” Kirby
said, and it was like the vacation had never happened. Even Tricia looked worried, for the fish. One of the kids, a big high school-sized one—dirty jeans and grubby cut-off sweat shirt, dark hair and a belly—had a stringer of fish. There were four other kids with him. They had to have been fishing all day, and perhaps all the night before that; there were a lot of fish on the stringer.

  They ran down the hill, weaving in and out of the big pines. The oldest fucker, the big one, was carrying the stringer of fish, running with it like it was a string of firecrackers that was about to go off. Some of the fish were coming off the stringer as he ran; some of the other kids were dropping their tackle boxes and poles. By the glare of the streetlight, we saw one of them, the smallest— he could not have been more than nine years old—run smack into a tree. He was just looking back over his shoulder, up the hill at us, and then he went down, he just sank, and it was like the way the matador had gone down, the one that got gored. We passed him, kept running, after the big one, the one with the fish, who was into the center of the street and running down it like a small airplane taking off from a big runway: he was pulling away from us.

  Far ahead of us, we saw him look back at us and drop the stringer—running, faster and faster, passing from concentric circle of light to light, past each distant street lamp, getting farther and farther away from us.

  We stopped, gasping, when we got to the stringer of mostly dead fish. Shack was on it. A few of them, Shack included, were flopping weakly. But they had that bluish glaze starting up on their eyes, and they had all this street dust and gravel on their scales, and also up in the tender redness of their gills, and there wasn’t any doubt that the only thing they were doing was hurting, that there wouldn’t ever be any more life in them. They gasped the air, trying to get the other thing, but unable to find it: their mouths gaped, wilder and wilder, as if they’d been tricked. We were too far from the pool to do any good.