The Watch

by Rick Bass

  He smiled and gave a small whoop, and waved a fist in the air. The light on the other side of the trees, coming down onto the field, was the color of gold smoke.

  He had a sack of groceries with him, behind the engine, and he reached back and got a sandwich and a canned drink.

  They went to check the traps, the pits, flushing Buzbee’s troops back into the swamp, as ever.

  “I’d hoped we could have caught them all,” said Hollingsworth. His eyes were pale, mad, and he wanted to dig more holes.

  “Look,” he said. “They buried my mattress.” He bent down on the fresh mound and began digging at it with his hands; but he gave up shortly, and looked around blankly, as if forgetting why he had been digging in the first place.

  Buzbee and the women were getting angry at being chased so often, so regularly. They sat in the trees and waited. Some of the women said nothing, but hoped, to themselves, that Hollingsworth and Jesse would forget where some of the pits lay, and would stumble in.

  Jesse and Hollingsworth sat on Hollingsworth’s porch.

  “You don’t talk much,” Hollingsworth said, as if noticing for the first time.

  Jesse said nothing. It was getting near the twenty-minute mark. He had had two Cokes and a package of Twinkies. He was thinking about how it had been, when he had been in shape, and riding with the others, the pack: how his old iron bike had been a traitor some days, and his legs had laid down and died, and he had run out of wind—but how he had kept going, anyway, and how eventually—though only for a little while—it had gotten better.

  The bikers rode past. They were moving so fast. Hills were nothing to them. They had light bikes, expensive ones, and the climbs were only excuses to use the great strength of their legs. The wind in their faces, and pressing back against their chests, was but a reason and a direction, for a feeling: it was something to rail against, and defeat, or be defeated by—but it was tangible. Compared to some things, the wind was actually tangible.

  They shouted encouragement to one another as they jockeyed back and forth, sharing turns, breaking the wind for each other.

  “I’m ready,” Hollingsworth told Jesse on his next visit, a few days later.

  He was jumping up and down like a child.

  “I’m ready, I’m ready,” Hollingsworth sang. “Ready for anything.”

  He had a new plan. All he had been doing was thinking: trying to figure out a way to get something back.

  So Jesse rode his bike to town to get the supplies they would need: an extra lariat and rope for trussing him up with; they figured he would be senile and wild. Muzzles for the dogs. Jesse rode hard, for a fat man.

  The wind was coming up. It was the first week in September. The hay was baled, stood in tall rolls, and the fields looked tame, civilized, smoothed: flattened.

  They muzzled the dogs and put heavy leashes on their collars, and started out across the field with a kerosene lantern and some food and water.

  When they had crossed the field—half running, half being dragged by the big dogs’ eagerness—and came to the edge of the woods, they were halted by the mosquitoes, which rose up in a noisy dark cloud and fell upon them like soft fingers. The dogs turned back, whining in their muzzles, yelping, instinct warning them of the danger of these particular mosquitoes, and they kept backing away, back into the field, and would not go down into the swamp.

  So Hollingsworth and Jesse camped back in the wind of the pasture, in the cool grass, and waited for daylight. They could smell the smoke from Buzbee’s camp, but could see nothing, the woods were so dark. There was a quarter-moon, and it came up so close to them, over the trees, that they could see the craters.

  Hollingsworth talked. He talked about the space program. He asked Jesse if this wasn’t better than riding his old bike. They shared a can of Vienna sausage. Hollingsworth talked all night. Chuck-will’s-widows called, and bullbats thumped around in the grass, not far from their small fire: flinging themselves into the grass and flopping around as if mourning; rising again, flying past, and then twisting and slamming hard, without a cry, as if pulled down by a sudden force. As if their time was up. All around them, the bullbats flew like this, twisting and then diving into the ground, until it seemed to Jesse that they were trying to send a message: Go back, go back.

  And he imagined, as he tried not to listen to Hollingsworth, that the bikers he had ridden with, the Frenchmen, were asleep, or making love to soft women, or eating ice-cream cones.

  A light drizzle woke Hollingsworth and Jesse and the dogs in the morning, and they stood up and stretched, and then moved on the camp. Crickets were chirping quietly in the soft rain, and the field was steaming. There wasn’t any more smoke from the fire. The dogs had been smelling Buzbee and his camp all night, and were nearly crazed: their chests swelled and strained like barrels of apples, like hearts of anger, and they jumped and twisted and tugged against their leashes, pulling Hollingsworth and Jesse behind them in a stumbling run through the wet grasses.

  Froth came from their muzzles, their rubbery lips. Their eyes were wild. They were too hard to hold. They pulled free of their leashes, and raced, silently, like the fastest thing in the world, accelerating across the field and into the woods, straight for the camp, the straightest thing that ever was.

  Jesse bought a bike with the reward money: a French bicycle, a racer, with tires that were thinner than a person’s finger held sideways. It could fly. It was light blue, like an old man’s eyes.

  Hollingsworth had chained Buzbee to the porch: had padlocked the clasp around his ankle with thirty feet of chain. It disgusted Jesse, but he was even more disgusted by his own part in the capture, and by the size of his stomach, his loss of muscle.

  He began to ride again: not with the pack, but by himself.

  He got fast again, as he had thought he could. He got faster than he had been before, faster than he had ever imagined, and bought a stopwatch and raced against himself, timing himself, riding up and down the same roads over and over again.

  Sometimes, riding, he would look up and see Buzbee out on the porch, standing, with Hollingsworth sitting behind him, talking. Hollingsworth would wave wildly.

  One night, when Jesse got in from his ride, the wind had shifted out of the warm west and was from the north, and it felt serious, and in it, after Jesse had bathed and gotten in bed, was the thing, not for the first time, but the most insistent that year, that made Jesse get back out of bed, where he was reading, and go outside and sit on the steps beneath his porch light. He tried to read.

  Moths fell down off the porch light’s bulb, brushed his shoulders, landed on the pages of his book, spun, and flew off, leaving traces of magic. And the wind began to stir harder. Stars were all above him, and they glittered and flashed in the wind. They seemed to be challenging him, daring him to see what was true.

  Two miles away, up on the hill, back in the trees, the A.M.E. congregation was singing. He couldn’t see the church lights, but for the first time that year he could hear the people singing, the way he could in the winter, when there were no leaves on the trees and when the air was colder, more brittle, and sounds carried. He could never hear the words, just the sad moaning that sometimes, finally, fell away into pleasure.

  He stood up on the porch and walked out into the yard, the cool grass, and tried some sit-ups. When he was through, he lay back, sweating slightly, breathing harder, and he watched the stars, but they weren’t as bright, it seemed, and he felt as if he had somehow failed them, had not done the thing expected or, rather, the thing demanded.

  When he woke up in the morning, turned on his side in the yard, lying out in the grass like an animal, the breeze was still blowing and the light of the day was gold, coming out of the pines on the east edge of his field.

  He sat up, stiffly, and for a moment forgot who he was, what he did, where he was—it was the breeze moving across him, so much cooler suddenly—and then he remembered, it was so simple, that he was supposed to ride.

&nbs
p; It was early November. It was impossible to look at the sky, at the trees, at the cattle in the fields even, and not know that it was November. The clasp around Buzbee’s ankle was cold; his legs were getting stronger from pulling the chain around with him. He stood out on the porch, and the air, when he breathed deeply, went all the way down into his chest: he felt good. He felt like wrestling an alligator.

  He had knocked Hollingsworth to the ground, tried to get him to tell him where the key was. But Hollingsworth, giggling, with his arm twisted behind his back—the older man riding him, breathing hard but steadily, pushing his son’s face into the floor—had told Buzbee that he had thrown the key away. And Buzbee, knowing his son, his poisoned loneliness, knew that it was so.

  The chain was too big to break or smash.

  Sometimes Buzbee cried, looking at it. He felt as if he could not breathe; it was as if he were being smothered. It was like a thing was about to come to a stop.

  He watched the field all the time. Jesse raced by, out on the road, checking his watch, looking at it, holding it in one hand, pedaling hard: flying, it seemed.

  Buzbee heard Hollingsworth moving behind him, coming out to gab. It was like being in a cell.

  Buzbee could see the trees, the watery blur of them, on the other side of the field.

  “Pop,” said Hollingsworth, ready with a story.

  Pop, my ass, thought Buzbee bitterly. He wanted to strangle his own son.

  He had so wanted to make a getaway—to have an escape, clean and free.

  He looked out at the field, remembering what it had been like with the women, and the alligators, and he thought how he would be breaking free again, shortly, for good.

  This time, he knew, he would get completely away.

  The blue line of trees, where he had been with the women, wavered and flowed, in watercolor blotches, and there was a dizziness high in his forehead. He closed his eyes and listened to his mad son babble, and he prepared, and made his plans.

  When he opened his eyes, the road was empty in front of him. Jesse was gone: a streak, a flash: already gone.

  It was as if he had never been there.

  Buzbee narrowed his eyes and gripped the porch railing, squinted at the trees, scowled, and tried to figure another way out.

  CATS AND STUDENTS, BUBBLES AND ABYSSES

  I got a roommate, he’s tall and skinny, when we get in arguments he says “I went to Millsaps,” uses the word like what he thinks a battering ram sounds like. He’s a real jerk, I could break both his arms just like that! if I wanted to, I’ve got a degree in English Literature from Jackson State, I was the only white on campus, I can’t use “I went to Jackson State” like a battering ram, but I can break both his arms. I got a doctorate, it took me three more years. I teach out at the junior-college— Freshman Comp, Heroes and Heroines of Southern Literature, Contemporary Southern Lit, Contemporary Northern Lit, that sort of crap. Piss-Ant studied geology, “pre-oil” he calls it facetiously, makes quite a ton of money, I swear I could tear an arm off his thin frail body and beat him over the head with it, I’m 5’6” tall, eighteen inches shorter than he but I’m thirty pounds heavier, an even 195, I played for the Tiges three years and can dead lift 700 pounds and run a marathon in under three hours six minutes.

  I swear one of these days I’m gonna kill him, he may have gone to Millsaps (“ ‘Saps,” he calls it, there, you hate him too) but he doesn’t know how to use a Kleenex. Instead he just goes around making these enormously tall wet sniffles, if you could hear just one of them you would first shiver and then you too would want to kill him. If they catch me and bring me to court I suppose I can always bring that up in the trial, I must go out and buy a tape recorder first thing tomorrow but first the cat needs feeding, he’s a violent little sunuvabitch.

  I will tell you about the cat after I tell you what I did in Arkansas.

  Back when I was a hot-shot cruising timber for Weyerhaeuser I had seven hillbillies and a nigger working under me, I told them where to cut the big trees, diameter breast height and all that mess; I had lots of money then but I quit that job. I got tired of seeing all those trees falling. I’m poor now but at least I got the hell out of the tree-killing business. Perhaps I could do him in in his bed, while he slept. I could cut his throat with a razor, make it look like he had an accident shaving.

  His name is W.C. He’s the only thing I like about Jackson, Mississippi. He’s a bad-ass: he only eats live pigeons. You know how cats can be finicky. I have to trap them for him under the interstate, off Fortification. The first time I was driving through Jackson I saw that street sign and about fell out of the car, I thought they had a street called Fornification. Everything has been sort of downhill since.

  Nights, when I’m not lifting, I’m working on a fourth degree, in Computer Science, out at the junior college, all my colleagues know this and think I’m thinking about leaving for a better-paying job in a state not southern in nationality. This worries them, I can tell, especially Slater. They don’t want me to leave, we generally have a pretty well-knit little group of us that drinks and parties and carries on and bad-mouths the students together, none of the rest of the faculty lifts but despite this I am still a pretty well-liked guy, they think just because I keep a road map of Montana rolled up in my bottom desk drawer that that is where I want to go next.

  Used to be people would only invite me over to their house when they were moving, to help them lift the refrigerator and the piano, you know, but would forget when it was time for the delicate stuff like waxing the cabinets or something, they’d invite damn near everybody except me. A person less sensitive than I might have been insulted, and left, moved away from the south. Not I. They just needed telling. In the noble West, where I used to live before I reached puberty, it was manly and virtuous not to tell people about yourself, but to let them find out. It made it better that way. But not in Mississippi. In the south, you were supposed to tell them. They held it against you if you didn’t, because it meant you were trying to hide something from them, trying to deprive them of something more precious to them than food (which is plenty precious enough, the south has lots of pretty girls yes but there’s a lot of awful fat ones too, oh well). I found out it was a mistake to deprive them of anything they could gossip about. Which is what you were doing if you didn’t tell them about yourself. I mean everything: good, bad or indifferent. Tell all, do, do.

  So.

  Look here, I said when I had this figured out, figured out why they weren’t inviting me to wax but instead only to move furniture. I am college educated. I have a degree from Jackson State. (I tried to say this like a battering ram.) Look here, I told them,

  I am a writer, almost.

  They liked that. They started inviting me to wax cabinets, arid other smart things. I was pleased. I had friends. I did not leave the south as others might have.

  I did not tell you about that writing thing.

  W. C. wouldn’t like Montana. He’d freeze his ass off. But I don’t tell them that: it is fun to think they think I’m thinking about leaving, and to tell me with knowing, understanding looks, to “hang in there” whenever we part company. They all think they know what I am going through, they think I hate the south like they do. It’s not much but then not many places are. I know lots of people who have gotten brave and left, gone to Texas, California, South Dakota, and places like that. Many people are leaving the south.

  The reason I room with a Piss-Ant is because he helps me pay for the rent. The reason I don’t room with Slater is because he yells in his sleep—lashes out at the world, very loudly, curses and even wakes the neighbors sometimes. Shit! Shit! Damn! That kind of thing.

  If you were wondering but were too shy to ask, then no, I’ve not had W.C. castrated, he’s mean enough as it is, besides, I want to make sure there’s as many of him around as possible. If all cats were like W.C. they wouldn’t have a bad name, not at all. I keep a set of barbells up at my desk, and when students are reading or taking a
test I sometimes do light pumping sets of Scott curls over the podium to keep my arms flushed. The wood creaks as I do this, a few of them look up occasionally and with interest but not many, they’re mostly candy-asses and pansies, and are waiting for the scholarships to come through so they can go to Millsaps. W.C. would not like most of them.

  Except for Robby. Robby is sort of my protégé. Even though I haven’t ever done anything, he calls me his mentor. That’s his only flaw, his only weakness: calling an unpublished writer his mentor, when any professor in the whole frotting world would have him on, but that’s the kind of writer he is, or will be. He knows what he likes, and doesn’t give a rat’s ass about what anybody else thinks, he’s a winner in every way but that one.

  Robby is not waiting for a scholarship to come through so he can go to Millsaps.

  He sometimes comes over on weekends, drinks beer with me and Slater, we talk about girls, watch TV, cook a lot, we eat quite well. Slater used to be a poet, he’s nothing now, and he sort of looks on Robby and me with awe because we aren’t nothing yet, we haven’t given up yet, awed at me because I’m thirty-one and haven’t given up yet, and at Robby because he’s young and has potential.

  Most people stop wanting to be a writer around the age of sixteen.

  We expect Robby is stuck with the curse for life.

  He, Robby, hasn’t really written anything yet, not any stories or anything like that, but he can write the hell out of a sentence. He writes some of the best I’ve ever read, it’s just that they aren’t ever about anything. It’s like he gets tired easily. Sometimes it makes Slater’s and my stomachs hurt, we want so badly for him to write a whole story.

  If he ever gets untracked and is able to write a whole story or a book even, say six or seven thousand sentences about the same thing, then the big boys up in New York are going to go nuts about him. Where did this gem come from? they will ask.