The Watch

by Rick Bass

  When we hunt, Galena Jim drinks whiskey in the evenings, telling me about those stars, and he tells me other things, things that no one else knows, maybe not even Patsy. Jim has a son, Buck, nineteen years old, who is in the state prison in Choteau, a lifer, maximum security, for killing a man. Buck is his son from a long-ago marriage, his only son. Buck’s closer to my age than I am to Jim’s. I don’t know if Patsy knows about it or not. Somehow, I don’t think she does. Jim doesn’t talk about it much. Usually he just talks around the edges, like: “Wonder what Ol’ Buck’s doing tonight?” or something like that.

  Or he’ll talk about what it was like when he was nineteen, and twenty—things he used to do, and all the things he’s done since. He’ll ask me some of the things I’ve done, some of the things I’ve seen.

  Not much, I’ll feel like telling him, because it doesn’t feel like much, not yet. That’s part of the reason I hang around with Jim Ontz. But I can’t tell him that. I know it’ll let him down.

  So instead I’ll tell him about brown trout I’ve caught in Idaho, doubling their size, and the amount of time it took to land them. I’ll make up lies about beautiful women I’ve loved, married women, women who’ve done these unbelievable things, and it’s what we’re supposed to talk about, out there in the woods like that, and it seems to make Galena Jim feel both happy and sad—better, in a way—and he laughs, looks over at me and laughs, and I think it even makes him able to get to sleep.

  Hunting in a land where no one else can get to; bringing deer out of deep canyons and gorges that no one else could get them out of. I’ve still got my legs, my lower back: those Octobers, those early Novembers, we can do anything. Galena Jim said once that he had been thinking about breaking his son out of jail, but that was the only time he said that to me, never again, and I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know if I’d let him down by not volunteering, or what. I don’t know what I’d do if he brought it up again, and asked me to help.

  I think that I would have to help him.

  What I believe is this: that when Jim was young, he spent a lot of time on the circuit, trying to make it big, and not enough time around the house. I think that he has had his fill of horses, that maybe he has made some kind of promise to himself about never getting on them again.

  I think maybe too that in winter, when everyone else is trapped, bound by their cabins, he gets so far out into the woods, in such a blowing wind, that he forgets where he is, even who he is.

  I think he imagines he is his son, twenty years old, running the snowmobile along the frozen river, then stopping and getting off and walking up to his deadfall or his line-set: pulling the chain up out of the frozen waters, his eyes tearing and blurring in the cold—lifting the chain up, out there so far away from anyone, where no one can see, to find out if his luck has changed from yesterday, and what lies ahead in the next trap, and the next, and the next.

  I have seen Galena Jim ride a moose before. Not showing off for anyone, unless it was just me—I was the only one with him. We were driving up the part of Hellroaring Road where the old World War II asphalt ends from the logging days and it goes to weeds and dirt—up above Pete Creek Road, up above everything, almost into Canada—and it was near the pass, where you go over from Montana into Idaho. Jim was driving, we were looking for grouse, and we came upon this big bull moose standing in the middle of the road. He was taller than the truck: the largest I’d ever seen, with a spread of palm-antlers as wide as a breakfast table.

  Jim had been talking about food, about his favorite recipes for grouse, and for trout, and everything—he was supposed to go into Libby and cook dinner for Tiger, and was planning the menu, deciding what kind of wine to have with the meal—and this moose was suddenly in front of us, looking like he wanted to charge us, but turning instead, and running down the road ahead of us, like a blocker, clearing a path for us across the state line or something—and the moose wouldn’t jump off the road, wouldn’t veer to either side. Jim was gunning the truck, we were going thirty-five, almost forty miles an hour, right behind him and Jim told me to take the wheel and the gas pedal, and climbed out onto the roof before I could say anything.

  No one was around to see any of this. I couldn’t understand why he was doing it.

  He gave me the thumbs-up signal, and we pulled even with the big moose, racing alongside him, forty miles an hour with his clumsy, hoof-floating gallop, and he looked fierce, angry, outraged; and that was before Jim leaped on his back, like something falling from the sky.

  He clung to the big moose like a midget. The moose veered off the road and plowed through a bunch of low alder and fir, knocking Jim off, and then, like a bad bull in the rodeo, the moose came back up the hill, trying to gore Jim, to trample him; and I got the .30–.30 out, and was firing it into the air, and honking the horn, but couldn’t shoot the moose, because Jim was in the way, running and scrambling, diving around rocks and rolling under logs, clutching his heart.

  The moose lost Jim then, somehow, and came after the truck, and I was free to shoot it then; but I did not want to shoot a moose out of season, and especially such a fine moose as this one, and I did not know what Jim wanted me to do—what he would have done—and so I did not fire, and the moose slammed into the side of the truck and shook it, rocked it on its springs, roaring and coughing like a bull, and then it ran back down into the woods and disappeared.

  I gave Jim some water and held his head up, propped him against a rock. The left side of his face was drawn down and twitching slightly. He didn’t have any color, and for a moment, broken and hurt like that, almost helpless, he seemed like my friend rather than a teacher of any sort; and he seemed young, too, like he could have been just anybody, instead of Galena Jim Ontz, who had been thrown by a moose; and we sat there all afternoon, he with his eyes closed, resting, saving up, breathing slowly with cracked ribs.

  It was only late summer and did not get dark until around ten o’clock. By the time Jim finally felt strong enough for me to help him into the truck, a low full moon had come up, and I did not know how to make the ride down the Hellroaring Road any less rough, but I went as slow as I could, and looked over to see how he was taking it.

  He didn’t look to be in pain so much as just sick feeling, as if he had done something wrong, had made a mistake somewhere.

  “You’re a good boy,” he grunted when we finally got down off the road and back into the valley. I knew that in Libby, Tiger would be cursing him, maybe throwing things because he had not shown up; and I knew too that when we pulled up the driveway, with his truck battered and me getting out first, that Patsy would be frightened, that it would be like the worst of the dreams she never had; fearing the worst, knowing about his heart, and knowing about Jim. We drove with the windows down and a cool breeze in our faces, all the pastures bathed in bright silver moonlight, and the mountains all around the valley like a wall, holding us in.

  The road sparkled and glittered in front of us, a path of where Jim had once been; a road one might encounter only in a dream. It was a road he had helped make, and we flew across it, rushing to get home.

  THE WATCH

  When Hollingsworth’s father, Buzbee, was seventy-seven years old, he was worth a thousand dollars, that summer and fall. His name was up in all the restaurants and convenience stores, all along the interstate, and the indistinctions on the dark photocopies taped to doors and walls made him look distinguished, like someone else. The Xerox sheets didn’t even say Reward, Lost, or Missing. They just got right to the point: Mr. Buzbee, $1,000.

  The country Buzbee had disappeared in was piney woods, in the center of the state, away from the towns, the Mississippi—away from everything. There were swamps and ridges, and it was the hottest part of the state, and hardly anyone lived there. If they did, it was on those ridges, not down in the bottoms, and there were sometimes fields that had been cleared by hand, though the soil was poor and red, and could really grow nothing but tall lime-colored grass that bent in the wind
like waves in a storm, and was good for horses, and nothing else—no crops, no cattle, nothing worth a damn—and Hollingsworth did not doubt that Buzbee, who had just recently taken to pissing in his pants, was alive, perhaps even lying down in the deep grass somewhere, to be spiteful, like a dog.

  Hollingsworth knew the reward he was offering wasn’t much. He had a lot more money than that, but he read the papers and he knew that people in Jackson, the big town seventy miles north, offered that much every week, when their dogs ran off, or their cats went away somewhere to have kittens. Hollingsworth had offered only $1,000 for his father because $900 or some lesser figure would have seemed cheap—and some greater number would have made people think he was sad and missed the old man. It really cracked Hollingsworth up, reading about those lawyers in Jackson who would offer $1,000 for their tramp cats. He wondered how they came upon those figures—if they knew what a thing was really worth when they liked it.

  It was lonely without Buzbee—it was bad, it was much too quiet, especially in the evenings—and it was the first time in his life that Hollingsworth had ever heard such a silence. Sometimes cyclists would ride past his dried-out barn and country store, and there was one who would sometimes stop for a Coke, sweaty, breathing hard, and he was more like some sort of draft animal than a person, so intent was he upon his speed, and he never had time to chat with Hollingsworth, to spin tales. He said his name was Jesse; he would say hello, gulp his Coke, and then this Jesse would be off, hurrying to catch up with the others.

  Hollingsworth tried to guess the names of the other cyclists. He felt he had a secret over them: giving them names they didn’t know they had. He felt as if he owned them, as if he had them on some invisible string and could pull them back in just by muttering their names. He called all the others by French names—François, Pierre, Jacques—as they all rode French bicycles with an unpronounceable name—and he thought they were pansies, delicate, for having been given such soft and fluttering names—but he liked Jesse, and even more, he liked Jesse’s bike, which was a black Schwinn, a heavy old bike that Hollingsworth saw made Jesse struggle hard to stay up with the Frenchmen.

  Hollingsworth watched them ride, like a pack of animals, up and down the weedy, abandoned roads in the heat, disappearing into the shimmer that came up out of the road and the fields: the cyclists disappeared into the mirages, tracking a straight line, and then, later in the day—sitting on his porch, waiting—Hollings-worth would see them again when they came riding back out of the mirages.

  The very first time that Jesse had peeled off from the rest of the pack and stopped by Hollingsworth’s ratty-ass grocery for a Coke—the sound the old bottle made, sliding down the chute, Hollingsworth still had the old formula Cokes, as no one—no one—ever came to his old leaning barn of a store, set back on the hill off the deserted road—that first time, Hollingsworth was so excited at having a visitor that he couldn’t speak. He just kept swallowing, filling his stomach fuller and fuller with air—and the sound the old Coke bottle made sliding down the chute made Hollingsworth feel as if he had been struck in the head with it, as if he had been waiting at the bottom of the chute. No one had been out to his place since his father ran away: just the sheriff, once.

  The road past Hollingsworth’s store was the road of a ghost town. There had once been a good community, a big one—back at the turn of the century—down in the bottom, below his store—across the road, across the wide fields—rich growing grasses there, from the river’s flooding—the Bayou Pierre, which emptied into the Mississippi—and down in the tall hardwoods, with trees so thick that three men, holding arms, could not circle them, there had been a colony, a fair-sized town actually, that shipped cotton down the bayou in the fall, when the waters started to rise again.

  The town had been called Hollingsworth.

  But in 1903 the last survivors had died of yellow fever, as had happened in almost every other town in the state—strangely enough, those lying closest to swamps and bayous, where yellow fever had always been a problem, were the last towns to go under, the most resistant—and then in the years that followed, the new towns that re-established themselves in the state did not choose to locate near Hollingsworth again. Buzbee’s father had been one of the few who left before the town died, though he had contracted it, the yellow fever, and both Buzbee’s parents died shortly after Buzbee was born.

  Malaria came again in the 1930s, and got Buzbee’s wife— Hollingsworth’s mother—when Hollingsworth was born, but Buzbee and his new son stayed, dug in and refused to leave the store. When Hollingsworth was fifteen, they both caught it again, but fought it down, together, as it was the kind that attacked only every other day—a different strain than before—and their days of fever alternated, so that they were able to take care of each other: cleaning up the spitting and the vomiting of black blood; covering each other with blankets when the chills started, and building fires in the fireplace, even in summer. And they tried all the roots in the area, all the plants, and somehow—for they did not keep track of what they ate, they only sampled everything, anything that grew—pine boughs, cattails, wild carrots—they escaped being buried. Cemeteries were scattered throughout the woods and fields; nearly every place that was high and windy had one.

  So the fact that no one ever came to their store, that there never had been any business, was nothing for Buzbee and Hollingsworth; everything would always be a secondary calamity, after the two years of yellow fever, and burying everyone, everything. Waking up in the night, with a mosquito biting them, and wondering if it had the fever. There were cans of milk on the shelves in their store that were forty years old; bags of potato chips that were twenty years old, because neither of them liked potato chips.

  Hollingsworth would sit on his heels on the steps and tremble whenever Jesse and the others rode past, and on the times when Jesse turned in and came up to the store, so great was Hollingsworth’s hurry to light his cigarette and then talk, slowly, the way it was supposed to be done in the country, the way he had seen it in his imagination, when he thought about how he would like his life to really be—that he spilled two cigarettes, and had barely gotten the third lit and drawn one puff when Jesse finished his Coke and then stood back up, and put the wet empty bottle back in the wire rack, waved, and rode off, the great backs of his calves and hamstrings working up and down in swallowing shapes, like things trapped in a sack. So Hollingsworth had to wait again for Jesse to come back, and by the next time, he had decided for certain that Buzbee was just being spiteful.

  Before Buzbee had run away, sometimes Hollingsworth and Buzbee had cooked their dinners in the evenings, and other times they had driven into a town and ordered something, and looked around at people, and talked to the waitresses—but now, in the evenings, Hollingsworth stayed around, so as not to miss Jesse should he come by, and he ate briefly, sparingly, from his stocks on the shelves: dusty cans of Vienna sausage; sardines, and rock crackers. Warm beer, brands that had gone out of business a decade earlier, two decades. Holding out against time was difficult, but was also nothing after holding out against death. In cheating death, Hollingsworth and Buzbee had continued to live, had survived, but also, curiously, they had lost an edge of some sort: nothing would ever be quite as intense, nothing would ever really matter, after the biggest struggle.

  The old cans of food didn’t have any taste, but Hollingsworth didn’t mind. He didn’t see that it mattered much. Jesse said the other bikers wouldn’t stop because they thought the Cokes were bad for them: cut their wind, slowed them down.

  Hollingsworth had to fight down the feelings of wildness sometimes, now that his father was gone. Hollingsworth had never married, never had a friend other than his father. He had everything brought to him by the grocery truck, on the rarest of orders, and by the mail. He subscribed to The Wall Street Journal. It was eight days late by the time he received it—but he read it—and before Buzbee had run away they used to tell each other stories. They would start at sundown and tal
k until ten o’clock: Buzbee relating the ancient things, and Hollingsworth telling about everything that was in the paper. Buzbee’s stories were always better. They were things that had happened two, three miles away.

  As heirs to the town, Hollingsworth and Buzbee had once owned, back in the thirties, over two thousand acres of land— cypress and water oak, down in the swamp, and great thick bull pines, on the ridges—but they’d sold almost all of it to the timber companies—a forty- or eighty-acre tract every few years—and now they had almost no land left, just the shack in which they lived.

  But they had bushels and bushels of money, kept in peach bushel baskets in their closet, stacked high. They didn’t miss the land they had sold, but wished they had more, so that the pulpwood cutters would return: they had enjoyed the sound of the chain saws.

  Back when they’d been selling their land, and having it cut, they would sit on their porch in the evenings and listen to it, the far-off cutting, as if it were music: picturing the great trees falling; and feeling satisfied, somehow, each time they heard one hit.

  The first thing Jesse did in the mornings when he woke up was to check the sky, and then, stepping out onto the back porch, naked, the wind. If there wasn’t any, he would be relaxed and happy with his life. If it was windy—even the faintest stir against his shaved ankles, up and over his round legs—he would scowl, a grimace of concentration, and go in and fix his coffee. There couldn’t be any letting up on windy days, and if there was a breeze in the morning, it would build to true and hard wind for sure by afternoon: the heat of the fields rising, cooling, falling back down: blocks of air as slippery as his biking suit, sliding all up and down the roads, twisting through trees, looking for places to blow, paths of least resistance.