by Rick Bass
“They gone,” said a woman named Vesuvius. The singing had gone away when it got dark, as had the ominous sound of digging.
There was no moon, and it was hard, even though they were familiar with the woods, to find their way back to camp.
They built fires around Oney, and two days later she was better.
But they knew it would come again.
“Look at what that fool boy of yours has done,” Tasha said the next day. A deer had fallen into one of the pits and was leaping about, uninjured, trying to get free.
Buzbee said his favorite curse word, a new one that Oney had told him, “Fuckarama,” and they tried to rope the deer, but it was too wild: it would not let them get near.
“We could stone it,” Tasha said, but not with much certainty; they all knew they could not harm the deer, trapped as it was, so helpless.
Then at dusk they saw Oney’s husband moving through the woods, perilously close to their camp, moving through the gray trees, stalking their woods with a shotgun.
They hid in their huts and watched, hoping he would not look down the hill and see their camp, not see the alligators hanging.
Oney was whimpering. Her husband’s dark shape moved cautiously, but the light was going fast: that darkness of purple, all the light being drawn away. He faded; he disappeared, and it was dark. Then, in the night, they heard a yell and a blast, and then the quietest silence they had ever known.
It was a simple matter burying him in the morning. They hadn’t thought of letting the deer out that way. They had not thought of filling in the pit partially, so that the deer could walk out.
“You will get better,” they told Oney. She believed them. On the days in which she did not have the fever, she believed them. There was still, though, the memory of it.
It was escapable. Some people lived through it and survived. It didn’t get everyone. They didn’t all just lie down and die, those who got it.
She loved old Buzbee, on her good days. She laughed, and slept with him, rolled with him, and put into the back of her mind what had happened before, and what would be happening again.
Her teeth, white and huge, when she was laughing, pressing against him, clutching him, shutting her eyes. She would fight to keep it in the back of her mind, and to keep it behind her.
Jesse rode out to Hollingsworth’s in the go-cart. He took a back road, a different route. The air was cooler, it seemed that summer could be ending after all, and he felt like just getting out and seeing the country again. It was a road he had always liked to ride on, with or without the pack, back when he had been racing, and he had forgotten how fresh it had been, how it had tasted, just to look at it. He drove through a tunnel of trees; a pasture, on the other side of the trees, a stretch of pastel green, a smear of green, with charcoal cattle standing in it, and white egrets at their sides, pressed an image into the sides of his slow-moving vision. It was almost cold down in the creek bottom, going through the shade, so slowly.
He smiled and gave a small whoop, and waved a fist in the air. The light on the other side of the trees, coming down onto the field, was the color of gold smoke.
He had a sack of groceries with him, behind the engine, and he reached back and got a sandwich and a canned drink.
They went to check the traps, the pits, flushing Buzbee’s troops back into the swamp, as ever.
“I’d hoped we could have caught them all,” said Hollingsworth. His eyes were pale, mad, and he wanted to dig more holes.
“Look,” he said. “They buried my mattress.” He bent down on the fresh mound and began digging at it with his hands; but he gave up soon, and looked around blankly, as if forgetting why he had been digging in the first place.
Buzbee and the women were getting angry at being chased so often, so regularly. They sat in the trees and waited. Some of the women said nothing, but hoped to themselves that Hollingsworth and Jesse would forget where some of the pits lay, and would stumble in.
Jesse and Hollingsworth sat on Hollingsworth’s porch.
“You don’t talk much,” Hollingsworth said, as if noticing for the first time.
Jesse said nothing. It was getting near the twenty-minute mark. He had had two Cokes and a package of Twinkies. He was thinking about how it had been, when he had been in shape, and riding with the others, the pack: how his old iron bike had been a traitor some days, and his legs had laid down and died, and he had run out of wind, but how he had kept going anyway, and how eventually it had gotten better.
The bikers rode by. They were moving so fast. Hills were nothing to them. They had light bikes, expensive ones, and the climbs were only excuses to use the great strength of their legs. The wind in their faces, and pressing back against their chests, was but a reason and a direction, for a feeling; it was something to rail against, and defeat, or be defeated by—but it was tangible. Compared to some things, the wind was actually tangible.
They shouted encouragement to one another as they jockeyed back and forth, sharing turns, breaking the wind for each other.
“I’m ready,” Hollingsworth told Jesse on his next visit, a few days later.
He was jumping up and down like a child.
“I’m ready, I’m ready,” Hollingsworth sang. “Ready for anything.”
He had a new plan. All he had been doing was thinking: trying to figure out a way to get something back.
So Jesse rode his bike to town to get the supplies they would need: an extra lariat and rope for trussing him up with; they figured he would be senile and wild. Muzzles for the dogs. Jesse rode hard, for a fat man.
The wind was coming up. It was the first week in September. The hay was baled, stood in tall rolls, and the fields looked tame, civilized, smoothed: flattened.
They muzzled the dogs and put heavy leashes on their collars, then started out across the field with a kerosene lantern and some food and water.
When they had crossed the field—half running, half being dragged by the big dogs’ eagerness—and came to the edge of the woods, they were halted by the mosquitoes, which rose in a noisy dark cloud and fell upon them like soft fingers. The dogs turned back, whining in their muzzles, yelping, instinct warning them of the danger of these particular mosquitoes, and they kept backing away, retreating to the field, and would not go down into the swamp.
So Hollingsworth and Jesse camped back in the wind of the pasture, in the cool grass, and waited for daylight. They could smell the smoke from Buzbee’s camp, but could see nothing, the woods were so dark. There was a quarter-moon, and it came up so close to them, over the trees, that they could see the craters.
Hollingsworth talked. He talked about the space program. He asked Jesse if this wasn’t better than riding his old bike. They shared a can of Vienna sausage. Hollingsworth talked all night. Chuck-will’s-widows called and bullbats thumped around in the grass, not far from their small fire, flinging themselves into the grass and flopping around as if mourning; rising again, flying past, and then twisting and slamming hard, without a cry, as if pulled down by a sudden force. As if their time was up. All around them, the bullbats flew like this, twisting and then diving into the ground, until it seemed to Jesse that they were trying to send a message: Go back, go back.
And he imagined, as he tried not to listen to Hollingsworth, that the bikers he had ridden with, the Frenchmen, were asleep, or making love to soft women, or eating ice-cream cones.
A drizzle woke Hollingsworth and Jesse and the dogs in the morning, and they stood up and stretched, and then moved on the camp. Crickets were chirping quietly in the soft rain, and the field was steaming. There wasn’t any more smoke from the fire. The dogs had been smelling Buzbee and his camp all night, and were nearly crazed: their chests swelled and strained like barrels of apples, like hearts of anger, and they jumped and twisted and tugged against their leashes, pulling Hollingsworth and Jesse behind them in a stumbling run through the wet grasses.
Froth came from their muzzles, their rubbery lips. Their eyes we
re wild. They were too hard to hold. They pulled free of their leashes, and raced, silently, like the fastest thing in the world, accelerating across the field and into the woods, straight for the camp, the straightest thing that ever was.
Jesse bought a bike with the reward money: a French bicycle, a racer, with tires that were thinner than a person’s finger held sideways. It could fly. It was light blue, like an old man’s eyes.
Hollingsworth had chained Buzbee to the porch: had padlocked the clasp around his ankle with thirty feet of chain. It disgusted Jesse, but he was even more disgusted by his own part in the capture, and by the size of his stomach, his loss of muscle.
He began to ride again: not with the pack, but by himself.
He got fast again, as he had thought he could. He got faster than he had been before, faster than he had ever imagined, and bought a stopwatch and raced against himself, timing himself, riding up and down the same roads over and over again.
Sometimes, riding, he would look up and see Buzbee out on the porch, standing, with Hollingsworth sitting behind him, talking. Hollingsworth would wave wildly.
One night, when Jesse got in from his ride, the wind had shifted out of the warm west and was from the north, and it felt serious, and in it, after Jesse had bathed and gotten in bed, was the thing, not for the first time, but the most insistent that year, that made Jesse get back out of bed, where he was reading, and go outside and sit on the steps beneath his porch light. He tried to read.
Moths fell down off the porch light’s bulb, brushed his shoulders, landed on the pages of his book, spun, and flew off, leaving traces of magic. And the wind began to stir harder. Stars were all above him, and they glittered and flashed in the wind. They seemed to be challenging him, daring him to see what was true.
Two miles away, up on the hill, back in the trees, the A.M.E. congregation was singing. He couldn’t see the church lights, but for the first time that year he could hear the people singing, the way he could in the winter, when there were no leaves on the trees and when the air was colder, more brittle, and sounds carried. He could never hear the words, just the sad moaning that sometimes, finally, fell away into pleasure.
He stood up on the porch and walked out into the yard, the cool grass, and tried some sit-ups. When he was through, he lay back, sweating slightly, breathing harder, and he watched the stars, but they weren’t as bright, it seemed, and he felt as if he had somehow failed them, had not done the thing expected or, rather, the thing demanded.
When he woke up in the morning, turned on his side in the yard, lying out in the grass like an animal, the breeze was still blowing and the light of the day was gold, coming out of the pines on the east edge of his field.
He sat up stiffly, and for a moment forgot who he was, what he did, where he was—it was the breeze moving across him, so much cooler suddenly—and then he remembered, it was so simple, that he was supposed to ride.
It was early November. It was impossible to look at the sky, at the trees, at the cattle in the fields, and not know that it was November. The clasp around Buzbee’s ankle was cold; his legs were getting stronger from pulling the chain around with him. He stood out on the porch, and the air, when he breathed deeply, went all the way down into his chest. He felt good. He felt like wrestling an alligator.
He had knocked Hollingsworth to the ground, tried to get him to tell him where the key was. But Hollingsworth, giggling, with his arm twisted behind his back—the older man riding him, breathing hard but steadily, pushing his son’s face into the floor—had told Buzbee that he had thrown the key away. And Buzbee, knowing his son, his poisoned loneliness, knew that it was so.
The chain was too big to break or smash.
Sometimes Buzbee cried, looking at it. He felt as if he could not breathe; it was as if he were being smothered. It was like a thing was about to come to a stop.
He watched the field all the time. Jesse raced by, out on the road, checking his watch, looking at it, holding it in one hand, pedaling hard—flying, it seemed.
Buzbee heard Hollingsworth moving behind him, coming out to gab. It was like being in a cell.
Buzbee could see the trees, the watery blur of them, on the other side of the field.
“Pop,” said Hollingsworth, ready with a story.
Pop, my ass, thought Buzbee bitterly. He wanted to strangle his own son.
He had so wanted to make a getaway—to have an escape, clean and free.
He looked out at the field, remembering what it had been like with the women, and the alligators, and he thought how he would be breaking free again, shortly, for good.
This time, he knew, he would get completely away.
The blue line of trees, where he had been with the women, wavered and flowed, in watercolor blotches, and there was a dizziness high in his forehead. He closed his eyes and listened to his mad son babble, and he prepared, and made his plans.
When he opened his eyes, the road was empty in front of him. Jesse was gone—a streak, a flash: already gone.
It was as if he had never been there.
Buzbee narrowed his eyes and gripped the porch railing, squinted at the trees, scowled, and tried to figure another way out.
The Legend of Pig-Eye
We used to go to bars, the really seedy ones, to find our fights. It excited Don. He loved going into the dark old dives, ducking under the doorway and following me in, me with my robe on, my boxing gloves tied around my neck, and all the customers in the bar turning on their stools, as if someday someone special might be walking in, someone who could even help them out. But Don and I were not there to help them out.
Don had always trained his fighters this way: in dimly lit bars, with a hostile hometown crowd. We would get in his old red truck on Friday afternoons—Don and Betty, his wife, and Jason, their teenage son, and my two hounds, Homer and Ann—and head for the coast—Biloxi, Ocean Springs, Pascagoula—or the woods, to the Wagon Wheel in Utica. If enough time had passed for the men to have forgotten the speed of the punches, the force and snap of them, we’d go into Jackson, to the rotting, sawdust-floor bars like the Body Shop or the Tall Low Man. That was where the most money could be made, and it was sometimes where the best fighters could be found.
Jason waited in the truck with the dogs. Occasionally Betty would wait with him, with the windows rolled down so they could tell how the fight was going. But there were times when she went with us into the bar, because that raised the stakes: a woman, who was there only for the fight. We’d make anywhere from five hundred to a thousand dollars a night.
“Mack’ll fight anybody, of any size or any age, man or woman,” Don would say, standing behind the bar with his notepad, taking bets, though of course I never fought a woman. The people in the bar would pick their best fighter, and then watch that fighter, or Betty, or Don. Strangely, they never paid much attention to me. Don kept a set of gloves looped around his neck as he collected the bets. I would look around, wish for better lighting, and then I’d take my robe off. I’d have my gold trunks on underneath. A few customers, drunk or sober, would begin to realize that they had done the wrong thing. But by that time things were in motion, the bets had already been made, and there was nothing to do but play it out.
Don said that when I had won a hundred bar fights I could go to New York. He knew a promoter there to whom he sent his best fighters. Don, who was forty-four, trained only one fighter at a time. He himself hadn’t boxed in twenty years. Betty had made him promise, swear on all sorts of things, to stop once they got married. He had been very good, but he’d started seeing double after one fight, a fight he’d won but had been knocked down in three times, and he still saw double, twenty years later, whenever he got tired.
We’d leave the bar with the money tucked into a cigar box. In the summer there might be fog or a light mist falling, and Don would hold my robe over Betty’s head to keep her dry as we hurried away. We used the old beat-up truck so that when the drunks, angry that their fighter had lost, c
ame out to the parking lot, throwing bottles and rocks at us as we drove away, it wouldn’t matter too much if they hit it.
Whenever we talked about the fights, after they were over, Don always used words like “us,” “we,” and “ours.” My parents thought fighting was the worst thing a person could do, and so I liked the way Don said “we”: it sounded as though I wasn’t misbehaving all by myself.
“How’d it go?” Jason would ask.
“We smoked ’em,” Don would say. “We had a straight counterpuncher, a good man, but we kept our gloves up, worked on his body, and then got him with an overhand right. He didn’t know what hit him. When he came to, he wanted to check our gloves to see if we had put lead in them.”
Jason would squeal, smack his forehead, and wish that he’d been old enough to see the bout for himself.
We’d put the dogs, black-and-tan pups, in the back of the truck. The faithful Homer, frantic at having been separated from me, usually scrambled around, howling and pawing; but fat Ann curled up on a burlap sack and fell quickly asleep. We’d go out for pizza then, or to a drive-through hamburger place, and we’d talk about the fight as we waited for our order. We counted the money to make sure it was all there, though if it wasn’t, we sure weren’t going back after it.
We could tell just by looking at the outside what a place was going to be like, if it was the kind of place where we would have to leave Betty in the truck with Jason, sometimes with the engine running, and where we didn’t know for sure if we would win or lose.
We looked for the backwoods nightspots, more gathering places than bars, which were frequented by huge, angry men—men who either worked hard for a living and hated their jobs or did not work and hated that too, or who hated everything. These were the kinds of men we wanted to find, because they presented as much of a challenge as did any pro fighter.