The Watch

by Rick Bass

  My uncle and I were not Mormons. We lived in southern Utah, Uncle Mike and I and the rest of the town of Moab. In the summers, at night, thunderstorms would sometimes roll across the dry valley, illuminating the cliffs with flashes of lightning. There would be the explosions of light and for a second— beneath the cliffs—we could see the dry creeks and the town itself. The town had wide streets, like a stagecoach town in a Hollywood prop.

  There would be flash floods out in the desert: water so muddy and frothy, churning, that its anger was almost obscene, and it was anger. But then the floods were gone quickly, and they were easy to avoid in the first place, if you knew about them and knew to stay out of their way, even out of the places where they could occur.

  Tourists moved through our town on their way to the national parks. They reminded me of the bloated steers I would sometimes see floating down the Colorado, sweeping along with the current. The steers I saw were the ones that had fallen over the steep cliffs and into the river below; but the tourists came only in the summers.

  Mormons couldn’t date non-Mormons. It was a logical rule. There were different values, or so it was supposed, so we chose to believe.

  Among the elders of Moab there were corny handshakes, secret meeting rooms, silly passwords, but because I was young, I could move through the town and among the people. I could observe, as long as I made no threats against the religion’s integrity, no overtures against its gene pool.

  I was allowed to watch.

  There was a Mormon girl, Ruth, whom I wanted to get to know. She was two years younger than I was, but I liked the way she watched things. She looked at the tourists, and it seemed to me that she too might have been thinking about the cows, the ones that sometimes went over the cliffs. She looked at the sky sometimes, checking for I don’t know what.

  Other times I would see her watching me. I liked it, but knew better than to like it too much. I tried not to like it, and I tried not to watch back.

  It did cross my mind, too, that perhaps she was just crazy, slightly retarded, to be looking at me for so long, so directly. Just watching.

  That was how different things were. I really did not believe she could just be watching, and thinking.

  Uncle Mike and I ran wild cattle in the sage for a living, scrub steers that could handle the heat and rattlesnakes and snows of winter. The country in which the cattle were turned out was too vast for fences. Instead, we used brands, or nothing.

  Sometimes the cattle would be down along a salt creek in a willow flat, grazing in the dry field behind an old beaver dam. Other times they would be back up in the mesas and plateaus, hiding in the rocks.

  They had all the country they wanted, and their movements seemed to be mostly whimsical. All of the cattle were about the same size, and sometimes, in trying to cut yours away from the others, out of the big herd for market—for slaughter—if you got someone else’s cow, it was all right to go ahead and take that one instead of the one you wanted. They were all pretty much the same.

  But if you had scruples, you had to tell the person whose cow it was, when you did that, so that he could take one of yours.

  It wasn’t a thing Uncle Mike and I ever worried about, because we were good at cutting the cattle, and we hardly ever picked out anyone else’s cattle, even by mistake. We knew what we were doing, and as long as we didn’t make mistakes—if the job was done properly—there wasn’t a need for rules, scruples, or morals in the first place.

  What you had to remember about cutting cattle—and it was a thing Uncle Mike had told me—was to pretend that you were capable of being in two places at once: where the cow was going; and where it wanted to go.

  You had to get there ahead of it.

  We cut them on foot with our barking dogs. Sometimes we’d use the jeep. It was hard work, and it seemed to need doing constantly. Without fences, the cattle were always trying to drift north. The blue mountains shimmered, and seemed a place to go to. The mountains looked cooler than anything we had ever seen.

  So I couldn’t ask Ruth out. And why would I want to? One lousy kiss? She was flatchested, like a seven-year old boy, and she wore librarian’s gold wire-rimmed glasses, grandmother glasses.

  Her hair was a reddish color—the kind that you think is brown until it gets out into the sun—and it was thick. I was slightly jealous of all her freckles, and also of the old overalls she was always wearing. They looked as if they made her feel good, because she was always smiling, even if only slightly. I imagined what the denim softness felt like, on her ankles, on her thighs, and going higher.

  It was good, being out on the north end of town the way we were. At seventeen and eighteen, one expects the things that happen, I think; they do not come as a surprise, no matter what. Sometimes Mike and I would sit out on the patio and drink a beer or some vodka, or gin-and-tonics, with ice and limes—limes from faraway, tropical cultures—and we would watch the purple part of dusk rising up out of the dry valley, moving toward us, covering the desert like a spill. And the lights in town below would come on, in the purple valley.

  Ruth’s old Volkswagen came up our long road one evening, trailing dust from a long way off, and when she pulled up and got out she did not hesitate, but walked up to Uncle Mike and said that her car was dying on cool mornings, and also on hills, and that she needed new windshield wipers too.

  It was frightening, her having come up out of the valley like that and into our part of the desert, driving in such a straight line to get there. She just did it. But once she was there, I did not want her to leave. I knew it did not fit with the unspoken deal Mike and I had cut with the town, but I liked her being up there, on our plateau, and wasn’t eager for her to go back down.

  “This is a beautiful view,” she said, looking around at the purple dusk and the lights coming on in town. I offered her my drink, which I had not tasted yet, and she sipped it, not even knowing what it was. Mike went in the garage to look at her car. I got a chair for Ruth and seated her. We didn’t say anything, just watched the desert, until it was completely dark.

  After a while, Mike came out of the garage with her old spark plugs, but I knew that spark plugs wouldn’t make her car do what it was she said it was doing.

  “Your wipers look fine,” he said. “The spark plugs will be five dollars.”

  She took the money from her shirt pocket—some of it in bills, some in coins—and she handed it to him.

  We sat there and each had another drink, and then the wind started to blow, the way it did every night, and made the wind chimes tinkle back in the garage.

  There was lightning to the south. We saw it almost every night, but it never seemed to reach Moab. Then, going home, driving back to town: her brake lights, tiny and red.

  There was one man, a bishop in the church, the head bishop for all of Moab—his name was Homer—and he was an attorney, the richest man in town. He had thousands of cattle, maybe more than anyone in Utah. The way he got his cattle when he wanted them for market was to send some of his men out into the desert with rifles to shoot them.

  It was lazy and simple and I thought it was wrong. The men would load the dead cattle into their trucks that way, and take them to Bishop Homer’s own slaughterhouse. We had to bring ours in alive.

  Uncle Mike and I did not like Bishop Homer, but we did not waste time worrying about him either.

  It was my job to keep Uncle Mike’s and my cattle away from the others, if I could. Every day after school, Ruth and I drove out into the desert in the jeep all that spring, and we chased Bishop Homer’s cattle with the dogs. We tried to keep his red-eyed, wormy dwarves away from our registered Hereford heifers. Bishop Homer had his men buy whatever passed through the auction circle at a low price, whether it was healthy or not—he didn’t look at the quality of an animal at all—and we tried to cut Mike’s and my cattle out of the big herds, and to keep them by themselves. All of the cattle gathered at the rim of the gorge, high up over the river, and they were always trying to find
different trails leading down. There wasn’t any way to get to the river—the cliffs were basalt, straight up and down—but the cattle watched the river daily, as if expecting that a new path might miraculously appear.

  The bulls were always hopping up on our heifers. Bishop Homer had it in his mind that the bulls could survive the desert better than the heifers, and he was particularly keen to buy any bulls that passed through the auction, no matter that he already had too many. He was too lazy to have them turned into steers. He just turned them out.

  The dogs raced alongside the stampeding bulls, snapping and barking. We ran along and behind them, shouting and throwing rocks, whenever we found them in with our heifers. Their great testicles tangled between their legs when they tried to run too fast, and were an easy target. It was a hot spring, and Bishop Homer’s cattle began to lose weight.

  Ruth and I made picnics. We carried mayonnaise jars wrapped in newspaper to keep them cool, full of lemonade with ice cubes rattling, and we took a blanket. There were sandbars down in the river gorge, and some days we would climb down the dangerous cliffs to them. There were caves along the river, dark recesses out of which small birds flew, back and forth into the sunlight. The water was cold and green and moving very fast.

  “Can you swim?” Ruth asked one day.

  “Yes,” I told her, though I could not, and was hoping she would not ask me to show her. I would have had to try, and almost certainly would have drowned.

  “I don’t know if I can or not,” she said. She didn’t seem particularly frightened, however.

  Other days we talked about Bishop Homer as we chased his cattle. He was in charge of Ruth’s ward. That was a church subdivision, like a platoon or a brigade.

  Ruth had taken an after-school job that spring as Bishop Homer’s secretary. He was good friends with her parents, and it was how she got the job.

  “He’s got three wives,” she said. “The one here in town, plus one in St. George, and one up north, in Logan.”

  Logan was a ski town, in the very northern part of the state. It took a lot of money to live in Logan, and it was usually where the not-so-very-good Mormons went, because it was a good place to have fun. A lot of people in Moab looked at Logan wistfully, on the map. I wondered what the wife in Logan was like.

  The bulls ran ahead of us at a steady trot, a sort of controlled panic; sometimes they stumbled but caught themselves.

  “I’m not supposed to know that,” Ruth shouted. “I’m the only one who knows.”

  We stopped the jeep and watched the cattle on the trail ahead, still trotting, back up into the rocks, to where there was no grass or water, not even a thin salt creek. I thought about how far we were from anything.

  There was a hawk out over the gorge, doing slow circles, and Ruth told me that Bishop Homer had touched her once.

  The engine was baking in the heat, making ticks and moans, and the wind was gusting, lifting the jeep off its shocks and rocking it. We watched the hawk and were pleased when we saw it fold its wings and dive, with a shrill cry, into the gorge.

  Later in the spring our heifers began dropping more calves. Wildflowers and cactus blossoms were everywhere. There were dwarf calves, red calves, ugly cream-colored calves, and stillborns. They all had to be taken away to market; not a one was worth keeping.

  Mike and I had Ruth over for dinner. She had church meetings almost every day, but she skipped some of them. We drank the gin-and-tonics, and it was okay for her to sit with her head in my lap, or mine in hers. The wind on the back patio was better than it had ever been that year; it seemed to bring new scents from new places, and it was stronger. Sometimes Ruth asked me if I was afraid of dying.

  We didn’t associate much in school. Being younger, she wasn’t in any of my classes, and it would have been trouble for her to be seen with me too often. Her parents didn’t like her spending the evenings out on my porch, but she told them she was proselytizing. So it was all right, and she kept coming out to our place to sit up there in the evenings.

  And then it was summer. We had more time than we could ever have wished for.

  We had all the time anyone could ever need, for anything.

  Our heifers were still dropping ruinous calves, and Mike said it had to stop. So one day, knowing what we were doing, and with the dogs to help us, we ran three of Bishop Homer’s woolly bulls right over the gorge, and we shouted, throwing things, and chased them toward it. Their fear took care of the rest.

  We stood there, slightly dizzy, exultant, and looked at-the green river below, the slow-moving spills of white that we knew were rapids. One of the bulls was broken on the rocks and two were washing through the rapids.

  “How many cattle would you say he has?” Ruth asked me. She slipped her hand in mine.

  I didn’t know.

  “What are his other two wives’ names?” I asked her. She had told me Bishop Homer was still bothering her.

  We watched that hawk again—it seemed to have come from nowhere, right in front of us, I could see the light brown and cream of its breast—and Ruth told me that their names were Rebecca and Rachel.

  “You’re going to stay with your Uncle Mike and work on trucks and cars, and raise the wild cattle, too, aren’t you, is that right?” she asked, on our way back. It was dark by then, with bright stars and the night winds starting up. The stars seemed to glimmer and flash above us, we didn’t have a top on the jeep, and instead of lying to her, I told her yes, it was what I would continue to do.

  We stopped wearing clothes when we were out in the desert in July, hot July: just our tennis shoes and socks. We raced the jeep, wearing our seat belts, and we set up small piles of stones, up high on the slickrock domes, where we could see forever, and we practiced racing around them, and cornering: we designed intricate, elaborate courses, through which we tried to race at the fastest possible speed.

  She was starting, finally, to get her breasts, which was all right with me. Both of us were lean, from chasing the bulls. The sun felt good, on our backs, our legs. We drove fast, wearing nothing.

  A bad thing was happening with the cattle, however; with Bishop Homer’s cattle. They were getting used to being chased, and would not run so far, or so easily; sometimes we had to ram them with the jeep to get them even to break into a grudging trot.

  The desert was like a park that summer. Flowers bloomed as never before: a different batch, different colors, every couple of weeks. It stormed almost every night, the heat of the day building up and then cooling quickly. The lightning storms rocketed up and down the cliffs of the river, and into town.

  Sometimes we made it back to Mike’s in time to watch the purple and then the darkness as it sank over the desert, like stage lighting, like the end of a show. But we didn’t always make it, and then we would watch from one of the slickrock domes, or we would hike up and sit beneath one of the eerie, looping rock arches.

  Some nights there was an early moon, and we could see the cattle, grazing on the worthless sage, and the jackrabbits moving around, too, everything ghostly in that light, everything coming out after dark.

  But other nights the storms would wash through quickly, windy drenching downpours that soaked us, and it was fun to sit on the rocks and let the storm hit us and beat against us. The nights were always warm, though cooler after those rains, and the smells were so sharp as to make us imagine that something new was out there, something happening that had never happened to anyone before.

  It was a good summer. Though there were too many cattle and too much grazing on the already spare land, the cattle did not eat the bitter flowers, and as a result, wild blooming blue and yellow weeds and wine-colored cactus blossoms rushed into the spots where the weak grasses had been, sprouting up out of the dried cattle droppings.

  In August, the mountains to the north took on a darker blue. And the smells seemed to change. They were coming from another direction. From behind us, from the north.

  Occasionally, Ruth’s parents would ask her how I
was doing, if I was thinking about changing yet. “Converting,” was the term they used; and even the thought of it terrified me.

  Ruth said that she had told them I was very close: very, very close.

  She watched me as she said this. We were sitting on the boulders down by the white rapids, throwing driftwood branches into the center.

  Then, up above us, I saw a man looking down, a man with a camera. He was up on the rim. He was so far up there. He took pictures of us while we sat on the rocks, and I looked up at him but didn’t move, because there was not much I could do; our clothes were up by the jeep. Ruth didn’t see him, and I didn’t want to alarm her. Just a lost tourist, I thought. A lost tourist with a big lens.

  But it was him, of course. I found that out soon enough, though I didn’t know what he looked like. When we got back up on the rim, I saw his cattle company’s pale blue truck, tiny and raising dust, moving slowly away to the north, and I realized that he had come into the desert for some of his cows.

  Ruth didn’t say much all the rest of the day, but that evening, driving home, when we stopped at a junkyard outside the city limits and pulled in and turned the lights off, she looked at all the old rusting heaps and goggle-eyed wrecks, and then, as if we had been married for fifteen years, she helped me get the picnic blanket out. The night was warm and we lay there among the wrecks, and I thought that one of us would get her soul, Homer or myself, and wasn’t sure I wanted it. It seemed like a pretty big thing to take, even if she was determined to be rid of it.

  We were home before midnight, as was the rule.

  We did other new things, too, after that. Some new ground was opened up, it seemed, and we had more space in which to move, more things to see and look at and study. We learned how to track Gila monsters in the sand. Their heavy tails dragged behind them like clubs and they rested in the shade of the sagebrush. We would patiently track them, in our tennis shoes, following their staggering trail from shade bush to shade bush. Eventually, we would catch up with them.