by Rick Bass
They would be orange and black, beaded, motionless, and we never got too close to them once we had found them. The most beautiful thing in the desert was also the most dangerous.
We had a rule of our own. Any time we found a Gila monster, we had to kiss: slowly, and with everything we had.
We waded in the river, too, above the rapids. I was still afraid to go out into the deep and attempt swimming. But it was a game to see how close we could get to the rapids’ pull. Knee-deep, for Ruth; her small behind, like a fruit, as she !stood in the current, and felt the water shuddering against her legs, the backs of her knees.
Down in the gorge like that, there was only sun, and river, and sky, and the boulders around which the river flowed. I watched for the man with the camera, but he did not come back. Ankle-deep, and then knee-deep, I would come up behind Ruth, hold her hand, and then go out a little farther. The water beat against my thighs, splashing and spraying against me. She didn’t try to pull me back. She thought it was fun. And it was; but I kept expecting her to tighten her grip, and try to pull me back into the shallows.
Her hair was getting longer, more bleached, and she was just watching, laughing, holding her hand out at full arm’s length for me to hold on to. But she would have let go if I had slipped and gone down.
As the summer moved on, the thunderstorms that had been building after dusk were fewer and smaller; mostly it was just dry wind. Ruth had missed her period, and though I was troubled for her, worrying about her church and her parents’ reaction, I didn’t mind at all, not a bit. In fact, I liked it. I put my hand on it all the time, which pleased her.
But I knew that, unlike me, she had to be thinking of other things.
We still chased the cattle. Once in the jeep we ran an old stud Brangus over the edge, and got too close. A sliding swerve, gravel under our tires; we hit a rock and went up on two wheels and almost went over. All the way down.
I had names picked out. I was going to build my own house, out even farther north, away from town, away from everything, and Ruth and I would be just fine. I had. names picked out, if it was a boy.
I was picturing what life would be like, and it seemed to me that it could keep on being the same. I could see it as clearly as I thought I’d ever seen anything.
I thought because she liked the gin-and-tonics, and the river wading, and chasing cows, Ruth would change. Convert. I knew she liked her church, believed in it, attended it, but I took for granted that as she grew larger, she would not remain in it, and she would come out a little north of town to live with me. That was the picture. In my mind, the picture became the truth, and I didn’t worry about anything.
Tumbleweeds blew down the center of Main Street, late at night. Dry and empty, they rolled like speedballs, hopping and skipping, smashing off the sides of buildings. They rolled like an army through town. We would sit on the sidewalk sometimes and wait for them, looking down the street—the town like a ghost town, that late at night—the wind would be in our faces, and we could never hear the tumbleweeds coming, but could only watch, and wait.
Then, finally, very close to ten o’clock, their dim shapes would come blowing toward us from out of the darkness. We would jump up and run out into their midst, and, as if they were medicine balls, we would try to catch them.
They weighed nothing. We would turn and try to run along with them, running down the center of Main Street, heading south and out of town, but we could never keep up, and we would have to stop for breath somewhere around Parkinson’s Drug Store. Mike had said that tumbleweeds were more like people than anything else in the world; that they always took the easiest path—always—and that the only way they would stop was if something latched on to them, or trapped them. A branch, a rock, a dead-end alley. . . .
During the last week in August, the north winds began to grow cool, and we wore light sweaters on the back porch. Ruth sipped her drink and kept one of her Mormon bibles—they had five or six—in her lap, and sometimes browsed through it. She’d never carried it around like that, and I found it slightly disturbing, but there were new smells, fresher and sharper, coming from the north, and sometimes we would turn and look back in that direction, though it would be dark and we would see nothing.
But we could imagine.
The winds made the mountains smell as beautiful as they must have looked.
Neither of us had ever been up in the mountains, but we had the little things, like the smells in the wind, that told us they were there, and even what they were like. Sometimes Ruth turned her head all the way around so that the wind was directly in her face, blowing her hair back.
She would sip her drink. She would squint beneath the patio light, and read.
It was a cold wind.
I had told Mike about Ruth and he had just nodded. He hadn’t said anything, but I felt as if he was somehow pleased; it seemed somehow, by the way he worked in the garage, to be a thing he was looking forward to seeing happen. I know that I was.
I rolled the jeep one day in August—no heat out in the desert, just a mild shimmering day, we were clothed—and I don’t remember how I did it, exactly. There weren’t any cattle around, but we were driving fast, just to feel the wind. Sometimes, over rises, the jeep would leave the ground, flying, and then it would come down with a smash, shaking the frame. We went over one rise, I think, and must have gotten too high, and came down on our side, Ruth’s side.
When we came to a stop, we were hanging upside down, saved by our belts, with broken glass all in our hair and the radiator steaming and tires hissing, and all sorts of fluids—strong-smelling gasoline, water, oils—dripping on us as if in a light rain. There was a lot of blood, from where Ruth’s leg had scraped across the rocks, skidding beneath the jeep, and I shouted her name, because she wasn’t moving.
I still remember the way I screamed for her. Sometimes I think it would be possible to still go out into that part of the desert and hunt the scream down, like some wild animal, track it right up into a canyon, and find it, still bouncing around off the rocks, never stopping—the sound waves still going—Ruth’s name, shouted by me, as she hung upside down, swinging, arms hanging, hair swinging, glasses hanging from one ear, everything all wrong, everything all pointed the wrong way.
Mike came in his station wagon and found us with a search-light, when we did not get in that night.
What Ruth did next was very strange. About two weeks later she stopped seeing me. I went to Bishop Homer’s law office where she was working full time, and I asked to see her.
She came out into the hall, looking very different, very changed. She had on a new dress and she was holding one of the bibles against her chest, almost clutching it. She seemed somehow frightened of me, but also almost disdainful.
“Ruth,” I said, and looked at her. She was all dressed up, and wouldn’t say anything. She was just looking at me: that look as if she was afraid I wanted to take something from her, that look that said, too, that she could kill me if I tried.
“The baby, Ruth,” I said. I ran a hand through my hair. I was wearing my old cattle-chasing clothes, and I felt like a boy, out there in the hall. There was no one else around. We were in a strange building, a strange hallway, and the river seemed very far away.
“Not yours,” she said suddenly. She clutched the Bible even tighter. There were tears in her eyes. “Not yours,” she said again. It’s the thing I think of most, when I think about it now, how hard it probably was for her to say that.
She sent the pictures and the negatives to me after she was settled in the mountains, in a town called Brigham City. It was about three hundred miles to the north.
Uncle Mike and I still cut our cattle for market. Bishop Homer still sends his men out into the desert to shoot his. Some days I still sit up in the rocks, with the old dogs and the jeep, and try to ambush his sorry bulls and chase them over the cliff; but other days, I just sit there and listen to the silence.
Sometimes the dogs and I go swimming in the
water above the rapids.
I try to imagine myself as being two people, in two places at once, but I cannot do it, not as well as I used to be able to.
Mike and I work on the trucks and cars together now. I hold the light for him, peering up into the dark maw of the engine, trying to see what part has gone wrong, what part is missing. It is hard work and sometimes we make the wrong choices.
One of us was frightened, too frightened, and though I’ve thought about it ever since, I still can’t figure out which of us it was.
I wonder how she is. I wonder what the things are that frighten her most now.
WILD HORSES
Karen was twenty-six. She had been engaged twice, married once. Her husband had run away with another woman after only six months. It still made her angry when she thought about it, which was not often.
The second man she had loved more, the most. He was the one she had been engaged to, but had not married. His name was Henry. He had drowned in the Mississippi the day before they were to be married. They never even found the body. He had a marker in the cemetery, but it was a sham. All her life, Karen had heard those stories about fiancés dying the day before the wedding; and then it had happened to her.
Henry and some of his friends, including his best friend, Sydney Bean, had been sitting up on the old railroad trestle, the old highway that ran so far and across that river, above the wide muddiness. Louisiana and trees on one side; Mississippi and trees, and some farms, on the other side—the place from which they had come. There had been a full moon and no wind, and they had been sitting above the water, maybe a hundred feet above it, laughing, and drinking Psychos from the Daquiri World over in Delta, Louisiana. The Psychos contained rum and Coca-Cola and various fruit juices and blue food coloring. They came in styrofoam cups the size of small trash cans, so large they had to be held with both hands. They had had too many of them: two, maybe three apiece.
Henry had stood up, beaten his chest like Tarzan, shouted, and then dived in. It had taken him forever, just to hit the water; the light from the moon was good, and they had been able to watch him, all the way down.
Sometimes Sydney Bean still came by to visit Karen. Sydney was gentle and sad, her own age, and he worked somewhere on a farm, out past Utica, back to the east, where he broke and sometimes trained horses.
Once a month—at the end of each month—Sydney would stay over on Karen’s farm, and they would go into her big empty closet, and he would let her hit him: striking him with her fists, kicking him, kneeing him, slapping his face until his ears rang and his nose bled; slapping and swinging at him until she was crying and her hair was wild and in her eyes, and the palms of her hands hurt too much to hit him any more.
It built up, the ache and the anger in Karen; and then, hitting Sydney, it went away for a while. He was a good friend. But the trouble was that it always came back.
Sometimes Sydney would try to help her in other ways. He would tell her that some day she was going to have to realize that Henry would not be coming back. Not ever—not in any form— but to remember what she had had, to keep that from going away.
Sydney would stand there, in the closet, and let her strike him. But the rules were strict: she had to keep her mouth closed. He would not let her call him names while she was hitting him.
Though she wanted to.
After it was over, and she was crying, more drained than she had felt since the last time, sobbing, her feelings laid bare, Sydney would help her up. He would take her into the bedroom and towel her forehead with a cool washcloth. Karen would be crying in a child’s gulping sobs, and he would brush her hair, hold her hand, even hold her against him, and pat her back while she moaned.
Farm sounds would come from the field, and when she looked out the window, she might see her neighbor, old Dr. Lynly, the vet, driving along in his ancient blue truck, moving along the bayou, down along the trees, with his dog, Buster, running along-side, barking; herding the cows together for vaccinations.
“I can still feel the hurt,” Karen would tell Sydney sometimes, when Sydney came over, not to be beaten up, but to cook supper for her, or to just sit on the back porch with her, and to watch the fields.
Sydney would nod whenever Karen said that she still hurt, and he would study his hands.
“I could have grabbed him,” he’d say, and then look up and out at the field some more. “I keep thinking that one of these years, I’m going to get a second chance.” Sydney would shake his head again. “I think I could have grabbed him,” he’d say.
“Or you could have dived in after him,” Karen would say, hopefully, wistfully. “Maybe you could have dived in after him.”
Her voice would trail off, and her face would be flat and weary.
On these occasions, Sydney Bean wanted the beatings to come once a week, or even daily, But they hurt, too, almost as much as the loss of his friend, and he said nothing. He still felt as if he owed Henry something. He didn’t know what.
Sometimes, when he was down on his knees, and Karen was kicking him or elbowing him, he felt close to it—and he almost felt angry at Karen—but he could never catch the shape of it, only the feeling.
He wanted to know what was owed, so he could go on.
On his own farm, there were cattle down in the fields, and they would get lost, separated from one another, and would low all through the night. It was a sound like soft thunder in the night, before the rain comes, and he liked it.
He raised the cattle, and trained horses too: he saddle-broke the young ones that had never been ridden before, the one-and two-year olds, the stallions, the wild mares. That pounding, and the evil, four-footed stamp-and-spin they went into when they could not shake him; when they began to do that, he knew he had them beaten. He charged $250 a horse, and sometimes it took him a month.
Old Dr. Lynly needed a helper, but couldn’t pay much, and Sydney, who had done some business with the vet, helped Karen get the job. She needed something to do besides sitting around on her back porch, waiting for the end of each month.
Dr. Lynly was older than Karen had thought he would be, when she met him up close. He had that look to him that told her it might be the last year of his life. It wasn’t so much any illness or feebleness or disability. It was just a finished look.
He and Buster—an Airedale, six years old—lived within the city limits of Vicksburg, down below the battlefield, hidden in one of the ravines—his house was up on blocks, the yard flooded with almost every rain—and in his yard, in various corrals and pens, were chickens, ducks, goats, sheep, ponies, horses, cows, and an ostrich. It was illegal to keep them as pets, and the city newspaper editor was after him to get rid of them, but Dr. Lynly claimed they were all being treated by his tiny clinic.
“You’re keeping these animals too long, Doc,” the editor told him. Dr. Lynly would pretend to be senile, and would pretend to think the editor was asking for a prescription, and would begin quoting various and random chemical names.
The Airedale minded Dr. Lynly exquisitely. He brought the paper, the slippers, he left the room on command, and he brought the chickens’ eggs, daily, into the kitchen, making several trips for his and Dr. Lynly’s breakfast. Dr. Lynly would have six eggs, fried for himself, and Buster would get a dozen or so, broken into his bowl raw. Any extras went into the refrigerator for Dr. Lynly to take on his rounds, though he no longer had many; only the very oldest people, who remembered him, and the very poorest, who knew he worked for free. They knew he would charge them only for the medicine.
Buster’s coat was glossy from the eggs, and burnished, black and tan. His eyes, deep in the curls, were bright, sometimes like the brightest things in the world. He watched Dr. Lynly all the time.
Sometimes Karen watched Dr. Lynly play with Buster, bending down and swatting him in the chest, slapping his shoulders. She had thought it would be mostly kittens and lambs. Mostly, though, he told her, it would be the horses.
The strongest creatures were the one
s that got the sickest, and their pain was unspeakable when they finally did yield to it. On the rounds with Dr. Lynly, Karen forgot to think about Henry at all. Though she was horrified by the pain, and almost wished it were hers, bearing it rather than watching it, when the horses suffered.
Once, when Sydney was with her, he had reached out and taken her hand in his. When she looked down and saw it, she had at first been puzzled, not recognizing what it was, and then repulsed, as if it were a giant slug: and she threw Sydney’s hand off hers quickly, and ran into her room.
Sydney stayed out on the porch. It was heavy blue twilight and all the cattle down in the fields were feeding.
“I’m sorry,” he called out. “But I can’t bring him back!” He waited for her to answer, but could only hear her sobs. It had been three years, he thought.
He knew he was wrong to have caught her off-balance like that: but he was tired of her unhappiness, and frustrated that he could do nothing to end it. The sounds of her crying carried, and the cows down in the fields began to move closer, with interest. The light had dimmed, there were only dark shadows and pale lights, and a low gold thumbnail of a moon—a wet moon—came up over the ragged tear of trees by the bayou.
The beauty of the evening, being on Karen’s back porch and in her life, when it should have been Henry, flooded Sydney with a sudden guilt. He had been fighting it, and holding it back, constantly: and then, suddenly, the quietness of the evening, and the stillness, released it.
He heard himself saying a crazy thing.
“I pushed him off, you know,” he said, loudly enough so she could hear. “I finished my drink, and put both hands on his skinny-ass little shoulders, and said, ‘Take a deep breath, Henry.’ I just pushed him off,” said Sydney.
It felt good, making up the lie. He was surprised at the relief he felt: it was as if he had control of the situation. It was like when he was on the horses, breaking them, trying to stay on.
