The Watch

by Rick Bass

  Eventually the pigs ate up all the timber they wanted and then there was a war and we cut and logged most of the rest (Ray lost a thumb), and then we plowed a good bit of the leftover into marshy farmland, these ovals and patches of corn in the wilderness, tractor rows furrowing right alongside and next to some still-standing groves and dark forest—near the heavy creeks, and down in the hollows—so that you can be a sodbuster and still hear alligators too, while farming, or be unhitching the mules, and step from bright farmer’s heat into the dark woods. I’m not sure I don’t like it better that way than how it was all woods, before. The little government bears still live in the woods and are forever clowning around: eating corn, racing in packs of five and six down the trails like schoolchildren, black as the earthen footpaths, excited, mischievous, racing down the trails.

  Becca loves to garden. She puts up with Ray. She honors him, and remembers who he was. He paws her, grabs at her behind through her dress, sometimes: she bustles past. Out to pick okra; off to feed the horses. She has strawberry hair and loves the horses. I have seen her hugging them. I think everyone has to do one really bad thing in life to call their life a life, and if I had not killed the man I would probably entertain taking my son’s wife from him and the children too and starting over. Or would have, ten years ago, anyway. Back when he started drinking. The children may not be his; I don’t know. I remember when Becca was big with the twins, big and feeding the horses, I was thinking this for no real reason and looked at her while I was thinking it and she saw it and looked quickly away, but I don’t know, I’m not much good with women, she may merely have been batting at a horsefly. My own wife and I had a special sort of trust and strength but then I didn’t want to buy a new truck, thought we could get by on the old one, and that was the end of that relationship. We sure do eat a lot of potatoes.

  Something always comes up though. I should probably stop worrying about it and have a little faith. I am good with engines (I know how to short coffee-pots). I bought the twins two red three-wheelers with burned-out valves and re-ground them, and now they run wild and strong again. I’m a provider. I refuse to believe in this business about my family being cursed for my wrong. This manure about the sins of the fathers and how they in any way can affect (adversely) the lives of their sons and daughters is just not so. You do for yourself: you make your own breaks, and pull yourself up, or stay down, depending entirely and only on what you want.

  I can provide anything. Maybe some day even I will be able to afford one of those satellite dishes in the front yard for Ray, so he can lie there in his bed and never leave, just rot away, with a hundred and seventeen different lives to choose from other than the own miserable one he is choosing for himself. Yeah, he’d like that. And oh, the kids would turn out real good then, yeah, sure.

  But I shouldn’t talk. It’s wrong to judge, even my own son. Those three-wheelers will probably be the death of the little twins before anything. They ride them like electrons, clinging to them; they curse, they give it full throttle. They’re so little, and get so caught up in it (no fear) that they sometimes forget to shift up, to change gears. They’ll wind those little re-bored engines up tighter than a buzz saw, just zing-whining up and over the fields (bumping across furrows, logs, leaving the ground from a natural ramp in a leap over the irrigation creek: I’m flying! I’m flying! Look, Ma, I’m flying!—looking back over their shoulders grinning, teeth missing, not even looking to where they’re going to land), (Everything will be all right) and I’ll have to shout at the lead one from my work, hoeing or weeding, or planting, “Change gears, dummy!” and if it’s Arthur, he’ll look down and remember and stick his tongue out the side of his mouth and pop it up a notch, and then immediately look back and shout, sternly, at Andrew: “Hey, change gears, dummy!”

  To Becca’s credit, she lets them go: she sees their happiness, their utter levitation, and rests her head on the horse’s shoulder, or leans on the hoe, and watches them, wistfully: not wistful that she could be doing it, too, but wistful that it is necessary to want them to be free, and in a better world, and a more complete happiness, as long as it can last. That she has to let them risk their lives and injuries, in order to have the lives and health she wants for them. They wear little blue crash helmets, blurs of colors when they are screaming through the woods, and elbow pads and tiny boots, and get up swearing when they crash. My head hurts when I hear them swear like their classmates have taught them: I do not want them to grow up to be the same—angry and obscene, like the rest of this defeated, backwoods state—but different.

  Things that are different must be strong. Things that are different will be told, and tried to be made, to yield. The little government bears are very hard to encounter, when you have a gun, but every year the hunters around here will bag a few, come driving or walking in with their pitiful smallness, maybe two or three of them slung over their shoulders, the hunters’ eyes glazed and tongues thick with a fungoid of self-congratulations and jack-off: having killed a Bear, you know.

  Myself, I’ve seen the bears pretty often. They’re on to me; they know the difference between camouflage green and army boots and me just leaning on my hoe, suspenders, a straw hat, no shirt, a day’s smell upon my body. When the evening gets cool I see them often. They don’t bother my fields, largely because I’m always working, but also because of the fury of the twins and the three-wheelers, but I’ve been out walking—on Sundays, when I take the day off—and seen them raiding others’ fields. I’ve seen as many as fourteen of them in a field at a time, teeth clicking and corn stalks waving and falling like some unleashed netherworld force is in them. The little government bears will run in shifts, back to the woods, on three legs, carrying as much corn as they can hold under their fourth arm, tucked up against their body. Except if they drop a piece, say, crossing the fence and back into the woods, they’ll look at it and then, as if saying ah, shit, they’ll let go of all of it, all the corn, and hurry back to the cornfield and pick up another load. Corn strewn everywhere, by night’s approach.

  There is no compromising, in those little government bears. Hunters will never be able to get all of them out of the woods.

  “Mama, mama, Goose has done took over the yard!” Their eyes are big. Comic. Earnest. Disbelieving. Asking their mother, What next? A mean goose, unruly in the yard for no sudden reason, routing the dog, the horse, even the twins. Goose has done took over. I’m eating breakfast, gumming grits, about to go out and plow, ever plow. Alice is sitting with me, and watches the boys with something beyond worship: the Twins! Where is hers? It is good that they go to their mother for permission, for issuance of news. Arthur has a hideous purple twist mark on his forearm, and Andrew, as if feeling his brother’s pain, is muttering damn, damn, damn, very seriously, and smacking his fist against the palm of his hand. Look out, goose.

  “Protect yourself!” she says. It is a cliché; she is wiping her hands on her apron. The sun through the kitchen window is making her hair look angelic. “Whup his button, and good,” she tells them. They look at each other. Mother has spoken. If nothing else they have learned obedience to her.

  Out in the field. Already sweating. The goose comes racing by, head stretched full out and flat to the ground, honking, bleating, a thing fearful for the first time, and in thirty-three years I have learned nothing, I am laughing, they are right on his tail running him down into the swamp with feathers flying and it is the goose’s eyes that are bugging now, great loud red Bigger Gooses after him now, two of them, and everything will turn on you, everything, if you live long enough—even good and bad luck. We must hope. The goose lay down there in the swamp all afternoon, exhausted, a muddy has-been, and before dusk I had to go get him and carry him up to the house, where I ousted the dog and put him in the kennel and locked the gate, to protect him from his enemies: the baleful hound, the pride-injured horses.

  The twins were gleeful, victorious, proud, and just-turned six. The goose was a candy goose, a broken thing, and later t
hat year we ate him at Thanksgiving with righteousness. Andrew said the prayer and told God he guessed we showed that goose’s ass. Ray didn’t make it out of bed. It rained. Then turned cold. The wind blew a hole in the roof. Andrew said he wanted to learn how to chew tobacco. I looked at Becca and my eyes said, I hate this state. And her eyes looked at me and said, Ray will never leave. I passed her the goose.

  My own son is taking a lifetime draught of self-pity and rolling around in his sorrow like a blind paralyzed baby opossum. Some days smell like death and tears. There’s a lady three miles down the road who handles snakes in her church services and I swear that takes less courage than to just duck your head and keep on doing what you are doing, the regular.

  Another neighbor killed an elk once. In Mississippi. Coming up the creek. He’d been seeing its tracks, and didn’t know what it was. Asked the game warden about it. The warden told him it was an elk, sure enough, and had escaped from this rich man’s farm. They’d been trying to trap it as it moved north, Thompson Creek, Pool Creek, Wausau Creek ... if they didn’t get it before summer and treat it, hot parasites would kill it. My neighbor was on a tree stand when he saw the elk; it was kind of staggering up the creek, already skeletal looking, and he shot him. Got his picture in the paper. He had elk steaks. I hate this state.

  They won’t tolerate anything different. That, more than anything, drives me to encourage the boys. Fit in where you don’t: make your own space. I want them to be different. So that they don’t give in.

  Exist somewhere you’re not supposed to, or where you don’t want to. Be your own men; do what you want, and don’t hurt anybody. What a real and utter victory that would be, the only and best victory.

  The boys have never seen the government bears. I can only hope that they will stare and wonder, maybe even marvel, but not shoot. Maybe even catch a glimpse of themselves. And of the bears’ greatness and earned freedom.

  My head hurts. But I’ve got to work. I’ve got to keep the twins and Alice fed. Becca can’t do it all herself. So they don’t show much resemblance to Ray. Who can blame her for wanting to escape, if only for a moment, like the twins over the irrigation ditch? Who can blame her?

  Little Alice has a cough; little Alice is always coughing. Always, the story remains the same. We will make it through somehow. She sleeps with a cotton gauze tent draped all around her bed; she comes to the porch in the butter sunlight, squinting or perhaps wincing, and watches the boys. Her feet are bare; her hand is dirty, and in her mouth. I leave the field and go to her and pick her up and kiss her; my straw hat shades her, and makes her laugh.

  Makes her laugh. You should always make children laugh. She has a pet chicken called Flute. We will not eat Flute.

  The wind, when a storm is coming, ruffles the hair on the back of my neck: even in the summer, chills the sweat, assuages my head, makes me shiver. The crops are pale water-colored green; the trees at their edges, dark forest color. Ray’s radio plays from back at the house faintly, its voice and message indescribable and meaningless as the birds begin to fly low in response to the plunge in barometer. It begins to rain. The crops will do well. There is nothing as good as standing in the middle of crops in the summer as it rains. I lean on my hoe and it slicks my hair down and soothes me.

  The children are amused. But even already, the boys show some slight mistrustful hint of understanding, of what is to come: they do not laugh nearly as hard as Alice.

  The other night I had a dream. I will live forever. I was seventy-five years old and was in a meadow, listening to my children’s children’s laughter. Children I had never seen before were laughing, playing, running. Everything was different, in the dream, than it is now. There were these white pastel flowers all in the field. Times were so good that we had decided not to even plant, that year. I was holding a glass of wine. Becca was smiling. Ray was sober.

  Off in the dark woods, trouble hid. It was so far away that it seemed it would never return.

  REDFISH

  Cuba Libres are made with rum, diet Coke, and lime juice. Kirby showed them to me, and someone, I am sure, showed them to him. They’ve probably been around forever, the way everything has. But the first time we really drank them was late at night on the beach in Galveston. There was a high wind coming off the water, and we had a fire roaring. I think that it felt good for Kirby to be away from Tricia for a while and I know that it felt good to be away from Houston.

  We were fishing for red drum—redfish—and somewhere, out in the darkness, beyond where we could see, we had hurled our hooks and sinkers, baited with live shrimp. There was a big moon and the waves blew spray into our faces and we wore heavy coats, and our faces were orange, to one another, from the light of the big driftwood fire.

  It is amazing, what washes in from the ocean. Everything in the world ends up, I think, on a beach. Whales, palm trees, television sets. . . . Kirby and I were sitting on a couch in the sand drinking the Cuba Libres and watching our lines, waiting for the big redfish to hit. When he did, or she, we were going to reel it in and then clean it there on the beach, rinse it off in the waves, and then we were going to grill it, on the big driftwood fire.

  It was our first time to drink Cuba Libres, and we liked them even better than margaritas. We had never caught redfish before, either, but had read about it in a book. We had bought the couch for ten dollars at a garage sale earlier in the day. We sank down deep into it and it was easy, comfortable fishing. In the morning, when the tide started to go out, we were going to wade-fish for speckled trout. We had read about that, too, and that was the way you were supposed to do it. You were supposed to go out into the waves after them. It sounded exciting. We had bought waders and saltwater fishing licenses and saltwater stamps, as well as the couch and the rum. We were going to get into a run of speckled trout and catch our limit, and load the ice chest with them, and take them back to Tricia, because Kirby had made her mad.

  But first we were going to catch a big redfish. We wouldn’t tell her about the redfish, we decided. We would grill it and drink more Cuba Libres and maybe take a short nap, before the tide changed, and we had our sleeping bags laid out on the sand for that purpose. They looked as if they had been washed ashore, too. It was December, and about thirty degrees. We were on the southeast end of the bay and the wind was strong. The flames from the fire were ten or twelve feet high, but we couldn’t get warm.

  There was all the wood in the world, huge beams from ships and who-knows-what, and we could make the fire as large as we wanted. We kept waiting for the big redfish to sieze our shrimp and run, to scoot back down into the depths. The book said they were bottom feeders.

  It seemed, drinking the Cuba Libres, that it would happen at any second. Kirby and Trish had gotten in a fight because Kirby had forgotten to feed the dogs that Saturday, while Trish was at work. Kirby said, drinking the Cuba Libres, that he had told her that what she was really mad about was the fact that she had to work that Saturday, while he had had the day off. (They both work in a bank, different banks, and handle money, and own sports cars.) Tricia had gotten really mad at that and had refused to feed the dogs.

  So Kirby fed his dog but did not feed Tricia’s. That was when Tricia got the maddest. Then they got into a fight about how Kirby’s dog, a German Shepherd, ate so much more, about ten times more, than did Tricky Woodles, a Cocker spaniel, Tricia’s dog. Good old Tricky Woo.

  On the beach, Kirby had a pocketbook that identified fishes of the Gulf Coast, and after each drink we would look at it, turning to the page with the picture of the red drum. We would study it, sitting there on the couch, as if we were in high school again, and were studying for some silly exam, instead of being out in the real world, braving the elements, tackling nature, fishing for the mighty red drum. The book said they could go as much as thirty pounds.

  “The elusive red drum!” Kirby shouted into the wind. We were only sipping the Cuba Libres, because they were so good, but they were adding up. They were new, and we had just d
iscovered them, and we wanted as many of them as we could get.

  “Elusive and wily!” I shouted. “Red E. Fish!”

  Kirby’s eyes darted and shifted like a cartoon character’s, the way they did when he was really drunk, which meant he would be passing out soon.

  “We could dynamite the ocean,” he said. “We could throw grenades into the waves, and stun the fish. They would come rolling in with the waves then, all the fish in the world.”

  He stood up, fell in the sand, and still on his knees, poured another drink. “I really want to see one,” he said.

  We left our poles and wandered down the beach: jumping and stamping, it was so cold. The wind tried to blow us over. We found an ancient, upright lifeguard’s tower, about twenty feet tall, and tried, in our drunkenness, to pull it down, to drag over to our fire. It was as sturdy as iron, and had barnacles on it, from where it had spent some time in the sea. We cut our hands badly, but it was dark and cold, and we did not find that out until later.

  We were a long way from our fire, and it looked a lot smaller, from where we were. The couch looked wrong, without us in it, sitting there by the fire, empty like that. Kirby started crying and said he was going home to Tricia but I told him to buck up and be a man. I didn’t know what that meant or even what I meant by saying that, but I knew that I did not want him to leave. We had come in his car, the kind everyone our age in Houston drove, if they had a job, if they had even a little money—a white BMW—and I wanted to stay, and see what a red drum looked like in the flesh.