by Rick Bass
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; 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. The lightning storms rocketed up and down the cliffs of the river, and into town.
Each night we tried to get 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 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 in the 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, above us, I saw a man looking down, a man with a camera. He was 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.
I had her 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 tracked them wearing nothing but our tennis shoes, following their staggering trail from shade bush to shade bush. Eventually, we would catch up with them.
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, just above the current as it shuddered against 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 knew to let go if I slipped and went 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 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 lemonade and kept one of her Mormon Bibl
es—they had five or six—in her lap, and 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 we would turn and look back in that direction, though it would be dark and we would see nothing.
But we could imagine.
The north winds made the mountains smell as beautiful as they must have looked.
Neither of us had ever been all the way up into 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, in that 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, and 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. 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, 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 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 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: 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 searchlight, when I did not get in that night.
Ruth healed, but what she did next was very strange. About two weeks later she stopped seeing me. She said she had made an error and that the gulf was too wide; that she had been mistaken. She stopped driving out to Mike’s and my home. She vanished.
After three weeks, 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: as if afraid I wanted to take something from her, and with a 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 occasionally 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.
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, as well. 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 seize 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 discovered 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 it 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.