The Watch

by Rick Bass

  “The FBI calls you,” Big Ed said, with certainty. “If they don’t have you on file, they just call you up, talk to you a while about some bogus sales offer—storm windows, insurance, Japanese Bibles—and then they hang up, and they’ve got you.”

  I dialed Kirby’s number two days later, and didn’t say anything when he answered.

  “Hello?” he said, again. I hung up. But then the phone rang, and this time it was my turn to speak into the receiver, “Hello?,” and not get an answer.

  We practiced changing our voices, talked like ducks, like old men, like street toughs to each other, practicing for when the FBI called, and that moment was at hand. Tears of laughter rolled down our faces. We howled like hyenas. We could laugh at anything, and the pleasure of it was odd and sincere. Who would want to leave? If we couldn’t date Laura and Emily, at least couldn’t we be crazy, laughing all the time?

  One Thursday night Kirby and I went out to the game, the Juggernauts were playing the team of an insurance firm from Boston that was in Houston for a convention—there were perhaps a hundred or more people in the stands, on either side of the teams—and we saw that number 52, wild Larry Loop, had his mask off for once, and he was talking to some people in the stands, only something was wrong, he wasn’t really Larry Loop at all, it was Big Ed, Ed Adams, our geometry teacher, dressed up like Larry.

  He looked like a clown, the clown that he was, standing there in the bulk of Larry’s uniform, ice white and heavy rich blue: again, like a little boy, playing astronaut, playing hockey player. He was wearing Larry’s big mittens and holding his stick, and hanging from his belt was the wild, frozen mask, a mute, noncommittal mouth cut into it for breathing. Big Ed was talking animatedly and, we could tell, intelligently, about the sport to a fan—a man in a business suit with a red tie and owl glasses, the tie swinging out away from him as he leaned against the glass to get closer to Larry Loop, to hear what he had to say.

  We were howling again, at the audacity of Big Ed’s trick at first, but even as we were registering that thought, we were taking note of the day he had come into class so battered, of the way he was now standing on the ice, in his skates, casually, and of how comfortable he appeared, talking, even while wearing the big suit.

  We weren’t even tempted to go down and meet him. Like quail in tall grass, we settled down deep into the back of the crowd and watched, without standing up, him play the whole game.

  And the Juggernauts lost, twelve to eleven, though Big Ed, Larry, scored several goals, and we wanted to stay for the other part we liked, at the end, where the losing team—all sweaty and sore and exhausted—had to crawl around on the ice with rags, erasing the smeared and dulled blue and red stripes and boundary lines they had just put down hours before—they had to have it clean again, by morning, no signs that they had been out there and had had glory—and the Juggernauts, or whoever lost, would be crawling on the ice, wiping up the stripes, and grown men in hockey suits would be skating around with brooms, sweeping the ice smooth again—and it was a thing we liked to watch, and often did, but the crowd was gone this night, we were almost the only two left in there, and the arena wasn’t the same any more, it was as threatening as a dark, slow lightning storm moving towards us, and we had to get out of there.

  And walking out across the parking lot, trying to laugh and howl at the lunacy of it but also not able to—recognizing, and being troubled by, the first signs of insincerity in this paradox— we stopped, when we realized we were passing by a parked dark green Corvette, and that Laura was standing by it, and she was holding his coat and tie in her arms, the clothes he had worn in class that day, and she had the keys in her hand, and she wasn’t a girl, she wasn’t even Laura, she was just some woman standing there, waiting for her man, with hopes and fears and other thoughts on her mind, a thousand other thoughts, she was just living, and it wasn’t pretend.

  The night was dark, without a moon, and she held our surprised looks, and in two months she would be graduating, and what she was doing would be okay then, we suddenly realized, if it was ever okay, and for the first time we saw the thing, in its immensity, and it was like coming around a bend or a trail in the woods and suddenly seeing the hugeness and emptiness of a great plowed pasture or field, when all one’s life up to that point has been spent close to but never seeing a field of that size. It was so large that it was very clear to us that the whole rest of our lives would be spent in a field like that, crossing it, and the look Laura gave us was sweet and kind, but also wise, and was like an old familiar welcome.

  This was back in those first days when Houston was clean and just growing, not yet beginning to die or get old. Houston was young, then, too. You cannot imagine how smooth life was for you, if you were in high school, that one spring, when oil was $42 a barrel, and everyone’s father was employed by the petroleum industry, and a hero for finding oil when the Arabs wouldn’t sell us any. Anything was possible.

  MISSISSIPPI

  As you know, there are no more Coca-Colas in Mississippi. There aren’t any cokes anywhere. They changed them; they did away with them, the fuckers. Except at my farmhouse. I have approximately two thousand seven hundred and forty-four of them in those little wooden flats that they used to ship them around in, faded, red and historic.

  When I have a bad day at work I will go home and throw three or four of them against the rocks in the back pasture.

  I have never been married but a fat rich girl asked me once. And this: this! People who borrow books, and then don’t return them! Obscenity! These people are scum and vermin, and the stuff that rolls around in balls and lurks in the comers on the wood floor beneath your high bed in the guest room: crash, crash, crash! There go three more Cokes for the morons and diarrhea people who do not return books but treat them instead as decks of cards, pencils, chewing gum. Oh may I borrow a piece of paper? And then they never return them.

  The fat girl who asked me to marry her bought me all those Cokes before leaving, and also said, oftentimes, that love was just saying ah what the heck and letting go, and accepting. She said that, yes: that love was accepting. And then she went out and bought about three hundred years’ worth of Cokes, because she didn’t like the new formula.

  Mosquitoes would feast on us when we slept on the bed by the open window, even though there was a screen. She drank a lot of Cokes. And her dog had fleas! The little pooch would stay over when she did, slept at the foot of the bed. The big rich girl’s name was Leanne. Take off the last two letters and she was lean. She had the kiss of an angel, though. When she kissed you it was like going swimming in the ocean on a hot day with a bunch of people standing around applauding. And I loved her.

  There are all these feral hounds in the woods where I live. And when we made love they would all start howling. I don’t know if it was coincidence or not. We usually made love about the same time every night. Pretty much the same way. None of this has anything to do with how sweet and truly good she was.

  Her father was in oil, oil was in her father. He used to say: “Finding oil is not so complex. It is really nothing more than deciding what you like. Everyone, all geologists, have access to pretty much the same set of facts. You just have to decide which ones you like in order to get to what it is you are looking for.”

  He was a mystic. But he voted for Republicans! They took less of his money, he said. They left more of it for him to spend on his daughter and mean son, he said.

  And his son was mean. His name was Hector. When he was a child if he didn’t like the clothes his oil father had put out for him to wear to school the next day, he would begin setting fire to things. I grew up with him. An absolute rotgut devil! He was as handsome as Leanne was fat. He would grow a moustache and then steal the girlfriends from people he didn’t like or who had crossed him. Just for a day, or a week.

  And he was in fights. And he drove fast. Yet we would go fishing together and he would be very gentle in taking the fish off the hook, wet his hands first before handl
ing it, etc. The breezes came under our arms and around us. Dragonflies would dab the water with their stingers. He liked me basically because I liked (loved) Leanne, and as I said before, she was wonderful. We both knew that. We would be sitting there together on a log on a clay bank, and he would know that I thought she was wonderful.

  She could make you cry, just watching her, when the wind was in her hair. She could stand over the big river in New Orleans, or outside on the back porch, or even in town, shopping, and you’d love her. She would always have something in her purse for me, and never mind what Hector and I did to the cars and sometimes the arms and legs of anyone who laughed at her. Because of her bigness. Because of their smallness.

  I’m pretty plump myself. I’m short. I have a temper. My nose is big and long. If I drink coffee it smells like death and end-of-world when I go to the bathroom and make big dirt. Leanne and her brother and I were going to drill for oil on the farm I rent. It is in Russum, Mississippi, in the wild big fairway of pumping and producing oil wells coming up from Louisiana and through Natchez that is said to end a good many miles south of Russum but they are wrong. After we found the oil, Hector was going to go to Montana and live like a jerk-off in a cabin with nothing to do but fish and drink and be happy all day. His father wouldn’t give him any money to leave the state with because he knew Hector would be gone if he did. Leanne was going to use the money to get skinny. I was going to go to school. I was going to get educated and learn things. It would be a dream well. Everything would be solved.

  “I know there’s oil under this fucking farm,” Hector would say. He would stamp his feet and stomp all around, as if daring it to come up or something, like a gopher. We believed him. Hector was like magic when he was angry.

  Summers in Mississippi are like this: no one else exists in the world. They’re that good. You can hang your cotton sheets on the line and the sun in them that night as you lie on them will make you have erections all night long. Our crickets are trained to sing prettier and more convincing and purely than nature should allow. Mississippi is a special place. Some days I like to go out in the tall grass and roll around like a dog.

  The Auto-View Drive-In Theatre in Port Gibson, Mississippi, on the river, is only forty minutes away, and the moon will come up full and delightful behind the screen, like a grinning thing, on the last Saturday of the month. I don’t know if they built the theatre that way or if the moon chose that place and seeks it out. These are little things but even so you can count on them, and others, daily. I lived in Chicago once and when I have nightmares occasionally it is to there that I return. There is a tremendous amount of love to be had in the numerous small things, and I think happiness is chiefly the adding up of a whole lot of little passions until a snowball effect is created and you find yourself playing in the midst of the big passions, love and hate, and running down the road and loving everything, consuming, consuming. Coca-Colas and mailboxes and fat girls and their dogs. I like the state of Mississippi. You can hear bull frogs down on the creek out the window at night.

  Water beetles! Water Beetles! We have water beetles, and they smell like roses! She showed them to me. We were driving around in her old car with the flea-dog and lots of money for lunch, and she stopped by a pond and showed me how to wade out and gather these little shelled diving bugs that smelled remarkably like roses.

  Once Hector and I caught an alligator snapping turtle. It weighed a hundred and fifty pounds. We were fishing with cane poles. Worms. His pole bent, and then snapped. The lost half of the pole sailed out into the creek. Hector said shit, angrily, and dived in after it. The turtle was already headed back down to bury in the mud. You can never get them out once they have buried themselves like that. Hector grabbed the line (35-pound mono: heavy enough to cut your hand like a laser, if you pull too hard) and began twanging it like a guitar string. He was saying shit and damn and calling the turtle a fucker. The vibrations on the line made the worm in the turtle’s mouth feel like an operating car wash and made him not want to burrow in the mud.

  “Fucker! Shit-brown! Ass goober!” Hector cried. He was in the shallows now on the other side of the creek and was dragging the thrashing reptile into the shallows too. I was twenty-five. The air smelled like hay and yellow flowers. Leanne would have had fun seeing the turtle. He got burrowed in the mud while Hector was trying to pull him out. Hector called me to wade in and help pull on his tail but we could not budge him. He made me stand there and hold that turtle by the tail on this hot day while he went to get the jeep. We got the fucker.

  The farmhouse I rent now is only three miles from this place where we used to fish. That is what my state is about. You know what I mean. I can go out on the porch in the morning and don’t have to bother remembering things because nothing is forgotten. Sometimes the air is purple, and smells of tornadoes, but it is all the same, if you haven’t forgotten.

  Owls. We got owls. At night they say whoo, and make you question your place in things, and even sometimes what is in you.

  Hector let the turtle snap up a piece of pine log and with his mouth thus occupied we took turns sitting on his back riding around on him. I thought it would be fun to take him to the town and show him off along with our muscles, but Hector said no, there were fuckers there in town and they would poke sticks at him. We fed the turtle a road map, a tennis ball, two apples and a warm tunafish sandwich, and then let him go.

  “Goodbye, you fucker,” Hector cried after him. The turtle was red-eyed and running for the creek like some kind of athlete. Hector shook his fist at the turtle. He was truly happy. “Goodbye, you fucker!” he cried again. There was triumph and victory and key elements of the Magna Charta in his voice; for the rest of the week Hector was like flowing water when he smiled.

  Listen, my state is this, too: the girls have pretty bosoms, under their swim suits. (Biloxi). The yellow dresses that they wear over bare ankles make you shiver when the wind blows.

  “Anger is as good as love,” Hector would say, more than once and in various ways. “I love feeling things. I am not afraid to feel the bad passions as well as the good. As long as I do not hurt anyone, sometimes I really love getting good and angry. I think the important thing is to not forget anything: to feel all passions and always be aware of them.”

  God, he was angry. We would eat peaches there on the creek and they would taste like August. The fences around the meadows were rusted and made of barbed wire. I would take naps now, though we didn’t then, and I haven’t forgotten anything. There were hawks that flew overhead.

  They say as you get older you tend to be more mellow, not so angry, but with Hector’s help, I am learning. Always she was doing things like that: buying me Cokes, borrowing my car and putting new tires on it, or subscribing to a magazine for me. And I forgot: I took these things for granted, let them slip away, so that now I am having to try hard to remember them. I am nothing, compared to Hector. If Hector knew I had those Cokes he would flush them down the toilet. He would swing baseball bats at them. He would think about people who judged you by looks or money and he would quite possibly drive his jeep through the living room and into the den, where most of those bottles are stacked.

  We go way back, Hector and me.

  We worked together for a moving company once, with a boss who had a face like a grin-baring vampire and who overworked us while still smiling. Hector threw a pie in his face and then asked for a raise.

  You can cheat the phone company out of twenty-five cents, too. You call them up and tell them you lost a quarter in a pay phone at so-and-so location. They will send you a check for twenty-five cents, or credit your account. Hector showed me this. Hector would do it dozens of times each month.

  There are wild turkeys in the woods. When it rains it smells like orchids out here. None of the preachers have any spit or love to them but they can be avoided. Tornadoes are exciting. They said the governor was a homosexual but he got elected anyway. When you are canoeing at night and the paddle first goes into the
water it sounds like God is talking to you.

  Drill for oil; eat seafood, wiping its salty goodness from your dripping mouth onto the tablecloth or napkin. Fish for flounder; catch monster turtles in the creeks. Oh, sir, I love my state! Passion, passion, lust! Hector’s father once told Hector and me that when he drilled for oil he imagined he was lowering his own penis into the earth, hot and seeking, searching for the oil. They say Hector’s mother was beautiful.

  Leanne got mad and went away when I said I didn’t want to marry her. She went to California and I suppose she has lost a lot of weight and changed her hair and is spending money. She can come back if she wants but it won’t be the same. She will have forgotten.

  Hector and I still go fishing. We talk about the oil well we are going to drill. We drink Cokes. We will not change. Hector is still angry. I still love Leanne. If she comes back and asks me again this time I will marry her. I have learned, from the people in my state, and that is what my answer will be.

  IN RUTH’S COUNTRY

  The rules for dating Mormon girls were simple.

  No coffee; no long hair.

  No curse words; one kiss.

  That was about it. It was simple. Anyone could do it.

  Utah is an odd state—the most beautiful, I think—because it is one thing but also another. It is red and hot in the desert—in the south—while the north has the cool and blue forests and mountains, which smell of fir and snow. And like so many things, when seen from a distance, they look unattainable, like a mystery, or a promise.