The Watch

by Rick Bass

  It’s like Gus is a friend now, so bad were the children who caught and killed Shack. Kirby even invites him over. Tricia’s sapped. She tried. She gathered everything and tried to hold it together. But she’s loosening up too. We all drink together now, around the house, and sometimes we make jokes, and laugh, lightly.

  She’s just an old woman, now: thirty, thirty-one. But I remember when she was younger, and when Kirby laughed, really laughed. I remember her rising up in the stadium, too, down in Mexico, so far from home, and cupping her program in her hands like a megaphone, and shouting in the heat, “Kill! Kill!” as the matador feinted, and stepped back, and twisted, and turned to escape what was coming.

  CHOTEAU

  Galena Jim Ontz has two girlfriends and a key to Canada. It’s the best hunting in North America, up the road, past the entry gate, where he has this key. The tiny dirt road going into Canada hugs a mountain face on one side, and the sheerest of cliffs on the other. Driving it, if you dare, you can look down and see the nauseating white spills of rapids in the Moyie River. There’s not a dead-end sign or anything to warn you when you first get on this road, and you follow it straight up the mountain, around a few bends, then—as if climbing into the clouds—always, you keep going up, and the smart people who somehow find themselves on this road will stop and park, and get out and walk, if they want to see what’s ahead (no place to turn around: you have to suck in your breath and back down, stopping to throw up sometimes— the jeep, or truck, slides when you tap the brakes, rolls on the loose gravel, acts as if it’s going to take you over the edge and into space beyond; sometimes it does, and you can see wreckage on the rocks below). But Galena Jim guns his old black truck up the road without a care, and when he gets to the heavy crossbar gate with the padlock on it, no sign differentiating the United States from Canada, just a gate, he gets out and opens it with his key, and we drive through, and then he gets out again and locks it behind us, and we’ve left northern Idaho and are in a new country, pioneers, it seems, hunting in a country that has never been hunted.

  “Oui,” says Jim, grinning. He’s got black hair, an old lined-looking face—he’s forty—and light blue eyes, a kid’s grin. “Oui, oui, oui.” It’s the only French he knows. He loves to hunt. I don’t know how he got the key. Some sort of charm or guile somewhere, I’m sure. People only see that side of him. Though surely Patsy, who has been his girlfriend ever since she left Oklahoma with him, sees the other part. I do, too. He is still a boy, still learning to be a man, this in the fortieth year of his life. He doesn’t always make the right choices—but he’s still trying, he still has choices to make, at least—an odd, stubborn sort of purity. I like Patsy. She’s forty, also. I’m not so wild about the girlfriend Jim keeps in Libby. The girl is sixteen, has yellow hair, and is a hard talker, ready to get out of the sticks, ready to go on the road. Except she’s frightened, I think, and wants Jim to go with her. Which he won’t, of course.

  But he’s got that choice. He still has so many! And who wouldn’t want to have Jim Ontz, Galena Jimmy Ontz, on the road with them, that first time?

  Everyone else sees just the boy in him, and is charmed, says, “That Jim,” etc., chuckles, buys him a drink, or what-have-you, and they think that’s how he is, that he’s a wild man, the wild man of Yaak Valley, and are glad to have him, a legend living among them, like a damn motto or state flag or something.

  They don’t understand that he’s still growing up, that he’s just getting rid of things, and trying to keep other things out.

  They call him Galena because of what he did to the road when he first moved up here, back when he and Patsy were about to get married. (They never did.)

  It was about ten years ago, and they’d just made the big strike down near Thompsons Falls. Galena is usually found as an ore, mixed in with what they call “country rock”—and all sorts of processing and smashing and refining is necessary to separate it—but occasionally a vein of pure glittering space-blue slick and shiny heavy-as-lead galena will be discovered, and they can claw that directly out of the mountain with a bulldozer.

  Jim had left the rodeo circuit, had come north. Most of the people living in the Yaak, then as well as now, were from Texas, but Jim was from Oklahoma, a little farther north. The country was and still is too tough for anyone else. It was when they were first putting a real road in through the valley—the last valley in the Rockies before you get up into Canada—and it’s still the last valley in Montana without electricity, and probably always will be—and Jim was working on the road crew, helping cut and blade through rock and forest the little one-lane road that follows the Yaak River, which flows west into the Kootenai.

  What Jim did was to steal a cement mixing truck from the road crew project, late on a Friday afternoon, after everyone had gone home—Jim was the only crew member who actually lived in the valley, all the others had gone home to Libby, or Bonner’s Ferry, or even Eureka—and he took it down to Thompsons Falls, with me and Patsy along for company, and he backed it up to the roadside cut where they were mining all of this galena straight from the vein.

  He climbed up on top of the mixer, so that he was right against the cliff, and with a hammer and railroad spike, he chiseled into the vein, spilling pebble- and cobble- and fist-sized pieces of galena down into the cement mixer’s huge bowl. We held flashlights for him so that he could see, and whenever a lone car or truck would come driving down the road, we’d turn the flashlights off and hold our breath. Jim would keep chipping, though, banging away at the side of the mountain with savage, rooting swings, as if there was something buried beneath the galena.

  It was a dark night, with the moon not up yet, but the galena was so shiny that it caught even the starlight, and Jim looked wild up there in the dark, his big arms and shoulders working frantically.

  And when he finally had the mixer loaded the way he wanted it, half-and-half—it was about midnight—he climbed down, too tired to drive, and Patsy drove us back to Yaak, taking dirt roads, going up through canyons, cutting across meadows, taking all the shortcuts, skipping the few little towns between Thompsons Falls and Yaak. We got stuck in the last meadow outside of the valley, coming up along a dry little beaver-dam creek, and we had to dump some of the galena-and-cement to lighten our load.

  By that time the moon was up over the mountains, and it shone down on us so brightly, lighting our every move, that it seemed unnatural, wrong—too bright—and as the galena splashed into the shallow creek, making a little dam, it sparkled with an eerie blue light that seemed almost to come from within, like some beautiful new electrified form of life, maybe even life being created, inside the mixer.

  We got the big truck going again, and drove, sliding and groaning, all the way up through the pasture like that, leaving a wide trail of galena, as if some beautiful animal had been wounded and was leaving a glowing blue spoor.

  When we got back out to the road, Jim hopped out and shut the sluice pipe, and no more galena was lost: but it’s still out there, a hundred-yard stripe of it, and hunters call it Galena Meadows now instead of the old name, which was forgotten, and that’s even how it shows up on the maps; and it’s beautiful, in the moonlight, shining in the night like an electric blue blaze. Helicopters land on it, whenever they have to fly into the valley to pick up an emergency patient, because it’s so easy to see, even in bad weather. The meadow is the safest place to land, and they aim for the galena, illuminated by their landing lights, shimmering, almost pulsing, as the winds blow snow across it.

  What Jim did next was pretty self-incriminating.

  He drove down the sidewalks of the little town of Yaak—a mercantile on one side of the street, and the Dirty Shame Saloon and a few houses on the other side—and with the cement mixer growling and tumbling, sloshing all that mixture around inside— lights coming on, from the cabins along the road—he poured galena sidewalks for the town, on either side of the new road that was coming through, and when he was finished with that he drove around an
d around in circles in the center of town, pouring a town plaza, right in the middle of where the road would be coming, so that it would have to fork left and right around this slick blue circle. And Dickie Mclntire, the owner of the saloon, came out and with the snowplow on his truck graded and leveled both the sidewalks and the little plaza-circle, and by the time the sun was coming up, the men of Yaak were building a gazebo out of lodgepoles in the center of the large blue circle, and Jim and Patsy and I had returned the cement mixer and had gone home and were sleeping hard.

  There aren’t but twenty or so people living in the valley, and we all liked the new sidewalks and the new plaza, and felt they were at least what the road crew owed us for the inconvenience of the new road and the people it would bring—and so no one said anything on Jim, although he had poured a little strip of the galena mixture all the way up to his cabin before returning the mixer—and then, even after the crew started back to work on the road, working for several more weeks, bits and chunks of galena were still falling out of the shaker, being poured out onto the new road, and now, at night, in places all along the new Yaak River Road, your car or truck headlights will pick up sudden, flashing blue-bolt chunks and swatches in the road, blazing like blue eyes, sunk down in the road—the whole road glittering and bouncing with that weird blue galena light, if you are driving fast.

  Jim says you need two of everything up here. Winters hit forty, sometimes fifty below, and the air as still as your sleep. Two trucks, two chainsaws, two girlfriends, says Jim. Two axes, two winches, two sets of snow chains. Mauls, generators, cross-country skis: two of everything, depend on nothing, and he’s right, of course.

  I moved up here from Fort Worth twelve years ago, and have given up trying to live with a girlfriend or a wife. I’ve gone through three of them, and the partings have always been wild and bitter, never pretty, always leaving great relief on either side after it was over. It’s a rough country, and beauty doesn’t do well up here unless it’s something permanent, like the mountains, or the river, or even the great forests, century-old larch and cedar. Jim and Patsy have been together as long as anyone up here, though, so perhaps what he says is true.

  The mean hard-mouthed girl comes into town sometimes, for a drink at the Dirty Shame, and whenever she comes in, Patsy gets up and leaves. The mean girl from Libby is named Wilmer, but Jim and everyone else calls her Tiger. She just turned sixteen in the spring; she used to be fifteen when she first started coming up here. It’s a different country.

  I watch Patsy going out to the truck, walking proudly, not looking back, whenever Tiger shows up. I really like Patsy. Patsy might be the best thing in this valley. She tans Jim’s hides and pelts, helps him with his trapline. She’s got long brown hair, down almost all the way to her butt, and a good, strong face. She’s from Illinois, but you’d swear Alaska. Patsy makes what she calls “dream hoops” for the entire valley, beautiful wreaths of bird feathers, feathers she’s found and not killed to get—grouse, eagle, crow, jay, owl—and the wreaths are small and thick, spiraling in on themselves, all feathers, with only a finger-sized hole in the center.

  You’re supposed to hang them over your bed, she says, right over your head, and all the bad dreams that would otherwise come to you in the night, making you anxious and tense the next day, instead get tangled up in the birds’ feathers. The good dreams are free then to come in through the small hole. It works, strangely enough; everyone agrees that it works. It’s spooky.

  Jim says that in the absolute dead of winter—during the Wolf Moon of January—trees splitting, exploding like fireworks all over the valley, and deer and elk freezing in their tracks, frozen in upright positions, standing out in the bright white meadows like statues, with no place left to go, just frozen, finally, from the great cold—he and Patsy will get so cabin-fevered, so out of their minds and rage-crazy that they could kill each other with swords, if they had to. When they start feeling that rumble coming on, that low, slow kick in the back of their heads and between their ears—the itch starting up—then one of them will go lock the guns in the bam and throw the key into a snowdrift, where it will not be found until spring thaw; and then, when their hate for each other, and for everything, for the entrapment of the cabin, can no longer be stood, but when stepping outside might be fatal—lung-searing, at a wind chill of seventy below—they put on these huge red inflatable child’s boxing gloves—“Rocky Boppers, they are called—and with these monstrously-oversized balloon-fisted gloves, they’ll stand in front of the fire and just let each other have it, whaling away, pounding and pounding on each other, jabs and hooks and uppercuts, all of it, fighting for over an hour sometimes, fighting until they can’t stand up; collapsing then, exhausted, as if drunk, in front of the fire, where they will fall asleep, into the deepest of sleeps, with a dream hoop over the mantel, until the fire dwindles and Jim must get up and take the balloon gloves off and go outside and get another log for the fire.

  Jim’s a tough man, a little on the short side, but heavy, about 170, 175 pounds. Still, I wouldn’t like to be on his end of it when Patsy gets crazy (though I can hardly imagine it, I have to go by what Jim tells me), because she’s taller than he is, has pretty good reach, and is in such good shape. I have to say that Jim isn’t.

  I’ve been skiing with Patsy in December, when the snow is still soft and fresh and the woods are silent, and we’re looking for feathers for her wreaths; and I can tell she has to hold back to keep from leaving me behind without even thinking about it. She’s the best damn skier in the valley, and sometimes when I look out my breakfast room window, even if there is a heavy snow falling, I’ll see her go trucking by, with a determined, wild, happy look on her face, and a Walkman strapped to her hip: lifting those skis and leaning forward and digging in with the poles, just flat-out racing, jamming to her old sixties and seventies rock and roll; escaping the winter, escaping her love for Jim, escaping everything.

  Jim and I hunt in the fall, waiting for the snows to come down so he can run his trapline. He traps anything, everything—mink, beaver, badger, coyote, wolf, panther, bear; but in the fall, what we hunt is deer and grouse.

  We don’t go after the elk any more, which are still up so high, and too hard to get to. Jim says he has a bad ticker, and perhaps he does, because he stops and rests often, even deer hunting, down in the low woods, along the creeks. We do a lot of still hunting, where we sit camouflaged, waiting on a ridge for something to walk past below.

  Jim doesn’t own a horse; he’s through with them, says he has gotten them out of his system. He runs his traplines on a snowmobile, of all things, loud and obnoxious in the winter stillness, but he says it’s faster (though not as dependable: it can’t tell where the ice is too thin, beneath the snow, the way a horse can; he’s ditched several into frozen streams that way, has barely gotten out alive, miles from home and twenty below, with dark coming on, sopping wet). Galena Jim is the last tough man there is, for a fact—but it’s because he’s still got that boy in him, some part he flat-out refuses to let go of. . . . And so in the fall, when we shoot our deer, I am the one who has to pack it out, because of Jim’s bad ticker and because he does not own a horse. He delights in shooting the biggest deer in the most remote places, places so far from a road that a helicopter with a winch-cable couldn’t get the deer out. And sometimes, for two or three days, we’ll pack the deer out, me pulling a travois-sled we’ve lashed together, dragging the cleaned deer out, Galena Jim walking beside me, or behind, whistling, smoking his pipe; sauntering, with his rifle strapped to his back, carrying a walking stick: out for a stroll.

  I’ll be lunging up the hills—leaping forward in the harness we’ve fashioned for me, trying to get old Jim’s big deer out of the woods; and he’ll do his sharpshooting trick of knocking the heads off grouse as we come upon them on the trail, leaving them headless, spinning in the pine needles, fresh juicy meat for supper. And that’s how we’ll go through the woods, moving back down out of Canada, where the deer are larger
and where there are no other hunters, and no roads—a hell of a good place to get lost— and we’ll finally work our way back to the one thin road that goes up above the Moyie River, the one with the gate.

  We’ll load up, and turn around at the end of the road (about ten miles into Canada) and drive back out, locking the gate behind us. Another trophy deer for Galena Jim Ontz. Sometimes I get one too, though as I get older, I would rather pull only one deer, instead of two.

  One year, when I was twenty-five—my strongest year—we got a moose as well as two deer. But now when we come across a moose in the woods, I shout and whistle and throw rocks at it, before Jim can shoot. Even at twenty-five, it took me a week to get the moose (and two deer) out of there.

  But we did get them out.

  “Man, you’re okay,” Galena Jim says at the end of each sled-pulling day. He’s a good cook, the best: those grouse on sticks, and potatoes in the coals; gravy from the deer meat, poured over the potatoes, and mashed. Jim knows all the names of the stars and constellations, and the precise distance we are from each of them (unless he is making it up, which I do not think he is). He points out the stars, so many of them, with a branch, and tells me the distance, in light years, as if he’s been judging that particular star for a long time, wondering if he could somehow get there. He likes the trapping season best, and that’s when he goes out alone, when everyone else (except Patsy) is trapped by the snow.

  We’ll sit there, so high in the Canadian Rockies, and watch clouds pass over the moon, feel the bite of what feels like the edges of eternity, a certain forever-aspect to things, as if this is the way it should always be up in this country—frigid, locked-in and cold, with springtime and yellow-flowered summer only an accident, which will, one of these years, not even bother happening. . . .