The Watch

by Rick Bass

  There was so much Hollingsworth wanted to tell someone! Jesse, or even François, Jacques, Pierre! Buzbee was gone! He and Buzbee had told each other all the old stories, again and again. There wasn’t anything new, not really, not of worth, and hadn’t been for a long time. Hollingsworth had even had to resort to fabricating things, pretending he was reading them in the paper, to match Buzbee during the last few years of storytelling. And now, alone, his imagination was turning in on itself, and growing, like the most uncontrollable kind of cancer, with nowhere to go, and in the evenings he went out on the porch and looked across the empty highway, into the waving fields in the ebbing winds, and beyond, down to the blue line of trees along the bayou, where he knew Buzbee was hiding out, and Hollingsworth would ring the dinner bell, loudly and clearly, with a grim anger, and he would hope, scanning the fields, that Buzbee would stand up and wave, and come back in.

  Jesse came by for another Coke in the second week of July. There was such heat. Hollingsworth had called in to Crystal Springs and had the asphalt truck come out and grade and level his gravel, pour hot slick new tar down over it, and smooth it out: it cooled, slowly, and was beautiful, almost iridescent, like a black-snake in the bright green grass: it glowed its way across the yard as if it were made of glass, a path straight to the store, coming in off the road. It beckoned.

  “So you got a new driveway,” Jesse said, looking down at his feet.

  The bottle was already in his hand; he was already taking the first sip.

  Nothing lasted; nothing!

  Hollingsworth clawed at his chest, his shirt pocket, for cigarettes. He pulled them out and got one and lit it, and then sat down and said, slowly, “Yes.” He looked out at the fields and couldn’t remember a single damn story.

  He groped, and faltered.

  “You may have noticed there’s a sudden abundance of old coins, especially quarters, say, 1964, 1965, the ones that have still got some silver in them,” Hollingsworth said casually, but it wasn’t the story in his heart.

  “This is nice,” Jesse said. “This is like what I race on sometimes.” The little tar strip leading in to the Coke machine and Hollingsworth’s porch was as black as a snake that had just freshly shed its skin, and was as smooth and new. Hollingsworth had been sweeping it twice a day, to keep twigs off it, and waiting.

  It was soft and comfortable to stand on; Jesse was testing it with his foot—pressing down on it, pleasurably, admiring the surface and firmness, yet also the give of it.

  “The Russians hoarded them, is my theory, got millions of them from our mints in the sixties, during the cold war,” Hollingsworth said quickly. Jesse was halfway through with his Coke. This wasn’t the way it was with Buzbee at all. “They’ve since subjected them to radiation—planted them amongst our populace.”

  Jesse’s calves looked like whales going away; his legs, like things from another world. They were grotesque when they moved and pumped.

  “I saw a man who looked like you,” Jesse told Hollingsworth in August.

  Jesse’s legs and deep chest were taking on a hardness and slickness that hadn’t been there before. He was drinking only half his Coke, and then slowly pouring the rest of it on the ground, while Hollingsworth watched, crestfallen: the visit already over, cut in half by dieting, and the mania for speed and distance.

  “Except he was real old,” Jesse said. “I think he was the man they’re looking for.” Jesse didn’t know Hollingsworth’s first or last name; he had never stopped to consider it.

  Hollingsworth couldn’t speak. The Coke had made a puddle and was fizzing, popping quietly in the dry grass. The sun was big and orange across the fields, going down behind the blue trees. It was beginning to cool. Doves were flying past, far over their heads, fat from the fields and late-summer grain. Hollingsworth wondered what Buzbee was eating, where he was living, why he had run away.

  “He was fixing to cross the road,” said Jesse.

  He was standing up: balancing carefully, in the little cleat shoes that would skid out from underneath him from time to time when he tried to walk in them. He didn’t use a stopwatch the way other cyclists did, but he knew he was getting faster, because just recently he had gotten the quiet, almost silent sensation—just a soft hushing—of falling, the one that athletes, and sometimes other people, get when they push deeper and deeper into their sport, until—like pushing through one final restraining layer of tissue, the last and thinnest, easiest one—they are falling, slowly, and there is nothing left in their life to stop them, no work is necessary, things are just happening, and they suddenly have all the time in the world to perfect their sport, because that’s all there is, one day, finally.

  “I tried to lay the bike down and get off and chase him,” Jesse said. “But my legs cramped up.”

  He put the Coke bottle in the rack.

  The sun was in Hollingsworth’s eyes: it was as if he were being struck blind. He could smell only Jesse’s heavy body odor, and could feel only the heat still radiating from his legs, like thick andirons taken from a fire: legs like a horse’s, standing there, with veins wrapping them, spidery, beneath the thin browned skin.

  “He was wearing dirty old overalls and no shirt,” said Jesse. “And listen to this. He had a live carp tucked under one arm, and it didn’t have a tail left on it. I had the thought that he had been eating on that fish’s tail, chewing on it.”

  Jesse was giving a speech. Hollingsworth felt himself twisting down and inside with pleasure, like he was swooning. Jesse kept talking, nailing home the facts.

  “He turned and ran like a deer, back down through the field, down toward the creek, and into those trees, still holding on to the fish.” Jesse turned and pointed. “I was thinking that if we could catch him on your tractor, run him down and lasso him, I’d split the reward money with you.” Jesse looked down at his legs: the round swell of them so ballooned and great that they hid completely his view of the tiny shoes below him. “I could never catch him by myself, on foot, I don’t think,” he said, almost apologetically. “For an old fucker, he’s fast. There’s no telling what he thinks he’s running from.”

  “Hogson, the farmer over on Green Gable Road, has got himself some hounds,” Hollingsworth heard himself saying, in a whisper. “He bought them from the penitentiary, when they turned mean, for five hundred dollars. They can track anything. They’ll run the old man to Florida if they catch his scent; they won’t ever let up.”

  Hollingsworth was remembering the hounds: black and tan, the colors of late frozen night, and cold honey in the sun, in the morning, and he was picturing the dogs moving through the forest, with Jesse and himself behind them: camping out! The dogs straining on their heavy leashes! Buzbee, slightly ahead of them, on the run, leaping logs, crashing the undergrowth, splashing through the bends and loops in the bayou: savage swamp birds, rafts of them, darkening the air as they rose in their fright, leaping up in entire rookeries . . . cries in the forest, it would be like the jungle .... It might take days! Stories around the campfire! He would tear off a greasy leg of chicken, from the grill, reach across to hand it to Jesse, and tell him about anything, everything.

  “We should try the tractor first,” Jesse said, thinking ahead. It was hard to think about a thing other than bicycling, and he was frowning and felt awkward, exposed, and, also, trapped: cut off from the escape route. “But if he gets down into the woods, we’ll probably have to use the dogs.”

  Hollingsworth was rolling up his pants leg, cigarette still in hand, to show Jesse the scar from the hunting accident when he was twelve: his father had said he thought he was a deer, and had shot him. Buzbee had been twenty-six.

  “I’m like you,” Hollingsworth said faithfully. “I can’t run worth a damn, either.” But Jesse had already mounted his bike: he was moving away, down the thin black strip, like a pilot taking a plane down a runway, to lift off, or like a fish running to sea; he entered the dead highway, which had patches of weeds growing up even in its center, and
he stood up in the clips and accelerated away, down through the trees, with the wind at his back, going home.

  He was gone almost immediately.

  Hollingsworth did not want to go back inside. The store had turned dark; the sun was down behind the trees. Hollingsworth sat down on the porch and watched the empty road. His mother had died giving birth to him. She, like his father, had been fourteen. He and his father had always been more like brothers to each other than anything else. Hollingsworth could remember playing a game with his father, perhaps when he was seven or eight, and his father then would have been twenty-one or so— Jesse’s age, roughly—and his father would run out into the field and hide, on their old homestead—racing down the hill, arms windmilling, and disappearing suddenly, diving down into the tall grass, while Hollingsworth—Quirter, Quirt—tried to find him. They played that game again and again, more than any other game in the world, and at all times of the year, not just in the summer.

  Buzbee had a favorite tree, and he sat up in the low branch of it often and looked back in the direction from which he had come. He saw the bikers every day. There weren’t ever cars on the road. The cyclists sometimes picnicked at a little roadside table, oranges and bottles of warm water and candy bars by the dozens—he had snuck out there in the evenings, before, right at dusk, and sorted through their garbage, nibbled some of the orange peelings—and he was nervous, in his tree, whenever they stopped for any reason.

  Buzbee had not in the least considered going back to his maddened son. He shifted on the branch and watched the cyclists eat their oranges. His back was slick with sweat, and he was rank, like the worst of animals. He and all the women bathed in the evenings in the bayou, in the shallows, rolling around in the mud. The women wouldn’t go out any deeper. Snakes swam in evil S-shapes, back and forth, as if patrolling. He was starting to learn the women well, and many of them were like his son in every regard, in that they always wanted to talk, it seemed—this compulsion to communicate, as if it could be used to keep something else away, something big and threatening. He thought about what the cold weather would be like, November and beyond, himself trapped, as it were, in the abandoned palmetto shack, with all of them around the fireplace, talking, for four months.

  He slid down from the tree and started out into the field, toward the cyclists—the women watched him go—and in the heat, in the long walk across the field, he became dizzy, started to fall several times, and for the briefest fragments of time he kept forgetting where he was, imagined that one of the cyclists was his son, that he was coming back in from the game that they used to play, and he stopped, knelt down in the grass and pretended to hide. Eventually, though, the cyclists finished eating, got up and rode away, down the road again. Buzbee watched them go, then stood up and turned and raced back down into the woods, to the women. He had become very frightened, for no reason, out in the field like that.

  Buzbee had found the old settlement after wandering around in the woods for a week. There were carp in the bayou, and gar, and catfish, and he wrestled the large ones out of the shallow oxbows that had been cut off from the rest of the water. He caught alligators, too, the small ones.

  He kept a small fire going, continuously, to keep the mosquitoes away, and as he caught more and more of the big fish, he hung them from the branches in his clearing, looped vine through their huge jaws and hung them like villains, all around in his small clearing, like the most ancient of burial grounds: all these vertical fish, out of the water, mouths gaping in silent death, as if preparing to ascend: they were all pointing up.

  The new pleasure of being alone sometimes stirred Buzbee so that he ran from errand to errand. He was getting ready for this new life, and with fall and winter coming on, he felt young.

  After a couple of weeks, he had followed the bayou upstream, toward town, backtracking the water’s sluggishness; he slept under the large logs that had fallen across it like netting, and he swatted at the mosquitoes that swarmed him whenever he stopped moving, in the evenings, and he had kept going, even at night. The moon came down through the bare limbs of the swamp-rotted ghost trees, skeleton-white, disease-killed, but as he got higher above the swamp and closer to the town, near daylight, the water moved faster, had some circulation, was still alive, and the mosquitoes were not a threat.

  He lay under a boxcar on the railroad tracks and looked across the road at the tired women going in and out of the washateria: moving so slowly, as if old. They were in their twenties, their thirties, their forties: they carried their baskets of wet clothes in front of them with a bumping, side-to-side motion, as if they were going to quit living on the very next step; their forearms sweated, glistened, and the sandals on their wide feet made flopping sounds, and he wanted to tell them about his settlement. He wanted five or six, ten or twenty of them. He wanted them walking around barefooted on the dark earth beneath his trees, beneath his hanging catfish and alligators, by the water, in the swamp.

  He stole four chickens and a rooster that night, hooded their eyes, and put them in a burlap sack, put three eggs in each of his shirt pockets, too, after sucking ten of them dry, greedily, gulping, in the almost wet brilliance of the moon, behind a chicken farm back west of town, along the bayou—and then he continued on down its banks, the burlap sack thrown over his back, the chickens and rooster warm against his damp body, and calm, waiting.

  He stopped when he came out of the green and thick woods, over a little ridge, and looked down into the country where the bayous slowed to heavy swamp and where the white and dead trees were and the bad mosquitoes lived—and he sat down and leaned his old back against a tree, and watched the moon and its blue light shining on the swamp, with his chickens. He waited until the sun came up and it got hot, and the mosquitoes had gone away, before starting down toward the last part of his journey, back to his camp.

  The rest of the day he gathered seeds and grain from the little raised hummocks and grassy spots in the woods, openings in the forest, to use for feed for the chickens, which moved in small crooked shapes of white, like little ghosts in the woods, all through his camp, but they did not leave it. The rooster flew up into a low tree and stared wildly, golden-eyed, down into the bayou. For weeks Buzbee had been hunting the quinine bushes said to have been planted there during the big epidemic, and on that day he found them, because the chickens went straight to them and began pecking at them as Buzbee had never seen chickens peck: they flew up into the leaves, smothered their bodies against the bushes as if mating with them, so wild were they to get to the berries.

  Buzbee’s father had planted the bushes, had received the seeds from South America, on a freighter that he met in New Orleans the third year of the epidemic, and he had returned with them to the settlement, that third year, when everyone went down finally.

  The plants had not done well; they kept rotting, and never, in Buzbee’s father’s time, bore fruit or made berries. Buzbee had listened to his father tell the story about how they rotted—but also how, briefly, they had lived, even flourished, for a week or two, and how the settlement had celebrated and danced, and cooked alligators and cattle, and prayed: and everyone in the settlement had planted quinine seeds, all over the woods, for miles, in every conceivable location ... and Buzbee knew immediately, when the chickens began to cluck and feed, that it was the quinine berries, which they knew instinctively they must eat, and he went and gathered all the berries, and finally, he knew, he was safe.

  The smoke from his fire, down in the low bottom, had spread through the swamp, and from above would have looked as if that portion of the bayou, going into the tangled dead trees, had simply disappeared: a large spill of white, a fuzzy, milky spot—and then, on the other side of the spill, coming out again, bayou once more.

  Buzbee was relieved to have the berries, and he let the fire go down: he let it die. He sat against his favorite tree by the water and watched for small alligators. When he saw one, he would leap into the water, splash and swim across to meet it, and wrestle it
out of the shallows and into the mud, where he would kill it savagely.

  But the days were long, and he did not see that many alligators, and many of the ones he did see were a little too large, sometimes far too large. Still, he had almost enough for winter, as it stood: those hanging from the trees, along with the gaping catfish, spun slowly in the breeze of fall coming, and if he waited and watched, eventually he would see one. He sat against the tree and watched, and ate berries, chewed them slowly, pleasuring in their sour taste.

  He imagined that they soured his blood: that they made him taste bad to the mosquitoes, and kept them away. Though he noticed they were still biting him, more even, now that the smoke was gone. But he got used to it.

  A chicken had disappeared, probably to a snake, but also possibly to anything, anything.

  The berries would keep him safe.

  He watched the water. Sometimes there would be the tiniest string of bubbles rising, from where an alligator was stirring in the mud below.

  Two of the women from the laundry came out of the woods, tentatively, having left their homes, following the bayou, to see if it was true: what they had heard. It was dusk, and their clothes were torn and their faces wild. Buzbee looked up and could see the fear, and he wanted to comfort them. He did not ask what had happened at their homes, what fear could make the woods and the bayou journey seem less frightening. They stayed back in the trees, frozen, and would not come with him, even when he took each by the hand, until he saw what it was that was horrifying them: the grinning reptiles, the dried fish, spinning from the trees—and he explained to them that he had put them there to smoke, for food, for the winter.

  “They smell good,” said the shorter one, heavier than her friend, her skin a deep black, like some poisonous berry. Her face was shiny.