by Rick Bass
They loaded their green canoe with gallon jugs of water the next day, tap water straight from their Houston faucets and hoses.
The canoe rode low in the water on their short trip out to the iron-and-chrome island, carrying the load of the three of them as well as their jugs of water. The gunwales of their green boat were no more than an inch above the murk of the river, and they sat in the canoe as still as perched birds to avoid capsizing, letting the current carry them to the island of trash.
Once there, they spent the rest of the afternoon scrubbing with steel wool and pouring the clean bright water over the encrusted, mud-slimed ornamenture of bumpers and freezers, boat hulls and car bodies. They polished the chrome appurtenances and rinsed the mountain anew.
When they had it sparkling, Annie climbed barefoot to the top and read a quote from Jeremiah: “And I brought you into the plentiful country, to eat the fruit thereof and the goodness thereof; but when ye entered, ye defiled my land and made mine heritage an abomination.”
On her climb up to the top, she had gashed her foot on the rusted corner of one sharp piece or another. She paid it no mind as she stood up there in her overalls, her red-brown hair stirring in the wind, a bright trickle of blood leaking from her pale foot, and Richard had the uneasy feeling that something whole and vital and time-crafted, rare, was leaking out of her through that wound, and that he, with his strange vision of the world and his half-assed, dreamy shenanigans, was partly responsible: if not for leading her directly astray, then at least for leading her down the path to the flimsy or even unlatched gate and showing her a view beyond.
And Kirby, too, viewing her blood, felt an almost overpowering wave of tenderness, and with his bare hand quickly wiped it from her foot, then put his arm around her as if to comfort her, though she did not feel discomforted; and now the two of them began to sink down into the fields of love, like twin pistons dropping a little deeper, leaving Richard off-balance for a moment, for a day, poised above, distanced now.
There was no clean water left with which to rinse or purify themselves after the ceremony. Instead they burned twisted bunches of green Johnson grass held in their hands, wands of slow-swirling blue smoke. Like pagans, they paddled back to shore, mucked across the oily sandbar, and while Richard and Kirby were loading the canoe back onto the car, Annie went off into the tall waving grass to pee, and when she came back she was carrying a dead white egret—not one of the splendid but common yellow-legged cattle egrets but a larger and much rarer snowy egret (within their lifetime it would all but vanish), whiter than even the clouds, so white that as Annie carried it, it seemed to glow. It had died so recently that it was still limp.
She laid it in the grass for them to examine. They stroked its head, and the long crested plumes flowing from the head. Perhaps it was only sleeping. Perhaps they could resuscitate it. Kirby stretched the wings out into a flying position, then folded them back in tight against the body. Nothing. Annie’s eyes watered, and again Kirby felt the overpowering wave of tenderness that was not brotherly but stronger, wilder, fiercer—as if it came from the river itself.
It seemed the obvious thing to do would be to bury the egret, but they couldn’t bring themselves to give such beauty back to the earth, much less to such an oily, drippy, marred earth, and so they took the canoe and paddled back out to the island and laid the bird—fierce-eyed and thick-beaked—to rest in the crown of the island, staring downriver like a gunner in his turret, with the breeze stirring his elegant plumage and a wreath of green grass in a garland around his snowy neck.
This time on the way out they remembered their oceanography assignment and scooped up a mayonnaise jar full of water and sediment that was the approximate color and consistency of watery diarrhea, and swabbed a dip net through the grass shallows, coming up with a quick catch of crabs and bent-backed, betumored mullet minnows. Then they loaded the canoe and drove back to school through the brilliant light, the three of them riding in the front seat together.
When they got back to school, they hurried up the stairwell with their fetid bounty, late to class as usual, and placed their murky-watered bottles on the cool marble lab table at the front of the room for the rest of the class to see.
Miss Countée made clucking sounds of pleasure and then dismay while she examined the macroinvertebrates as well as the crippled vertebrates, murmuring their names in genus and species, not as if naming them but instead greeting old acquaintances, old warriors, perhaps, from another time and place—and the other students got up from their seats and crowded around the jars and bottles as if to be closer to the presence of magic.
Richard and Annie and Kirby still had the marsh scent of the river on them, and the blue smoke odor of burnt Johnson grass, and sometimes, for a moment, Miss Countée and the students would get the strange feeling that the true wildness was not the catch in the mayonnaise jars but the catchers themselves.
Miss Countée took an eyedropper and drew up a shot of the dying Sabine, dripped it onto a slide, slid it under a microscope, and then crooned at all the violent erratica dashing about beneath her—the athleticism and diversity, the starts and stops and lunges, the silky passages, the creepings and slitherings, the throbbings and pulsings.
The river was dying, but it was still alive.
By October the leaves on the trees at water’s edge were turning yellow, and Annie was riding in the bathysphere.
As the sphere tumbled, she could orient herself to the surface by the bright glare above—the bouncy, jarring ride to the bottom, the tumultuous drift downstream, and then the shuddering tautness when the cable reached full draw. Usually she was busy laughing or praying for her life, but sometimes, at full stretch, she considered sex.
Then the crane lifted the sphere free and clear of the river, back into that bright light, water cascading off the bathysphere and glittering in sheets and torrents of sun diamonds (the awful river transformed, in that moment, into something briefly beautiful). To tease her, the boys would let her remain down there just a beat or two longer, each time, just long enough for the precursor of a thought to begin to enter her mind, the image that—despite their affection for her—something had snapped within them. Not quite the thought, but the advancing shadow of the thought, of the boys, her friends, climbing down from the crane and getting in the car and driving off. Not abandoning her, but going off for a burger and fries. And then forgetting her, perhaps, or getting in a wreck.
Always, the boys pulled her up and reeled her back in before the thought of abandonment formed fully, and the thought beyond that—the terror of utter loneliness, utter emptiness.
None of them questioned that the crane was there for them, a relic still operating for them. They didn’t question that it was tucked out of the way below a series of dunes and bluffs, away from the prying, curious eyes of man, and didn’t question the grace that allowed them to run it, day or night, unobserved. They didn’t question that the world, the whole world, belonged to them.
There were still a million, or maybe a hundred thousand, or at least ten thousand such places left in the world back then. Soft seams of possibility, places where no boundaries had been claimed—places where reservoirs of infinite potential lay exposed and waiting for the claimant, the discoverer, the laborer, the imaginer. Places of richness and health, even in the midst of gut-eating poisons.
For the first time, however, Richard and Kirby began to view each other as competitors. It was never a thought that lasted; always, they were ashamed of it and able to banish it at will—but for the first time, it was there.
The egret fell to pieces slowly. Sun-baked, rained-upon, wind-ruffled, ant-eaten, it deflated as if only now was its life leaving it; and then it disintegrated further until soon there were only piles of sun-bleached feathers lying in the cracks and crevices of the slag island below, and feathers loose, too, within the ghost frame of its own skeleton, still up there at the top of the machines.
As the egret decomposed, so too was revealed the
quarry within—the last meal upon which it had gorged—and they could see within the bone basket of its rib cage all the tiny fish skeletons, with their piles of scale-glitter lying around like bright sand. There were bumps and tumors, misshapen bends in the fishes’ skeletons, and as they rotted (flies feasting on them within that ventilated rib cage, as if trapped in a bottle, but free, also, to come and go) the toxic sludge of their lives melted to leave a bright metallic residue on the island, staining here and there like stripes of silver paint.
Sometimes they would be too restless to fool with even the magnificence of the crane. Bored with the familiar, the three of them would walk down the abandoned railroad tracks, gathering plump late-season dewberries, blackening their hands with the juice until they looked as if they had been working with oil. Kirby or Richard would take off his shirt and make a sling out of it in which to gather the berries. Their mouths, their lips, would be black-ringed like clowns’.
She beheld their bodies. They filled her dreams—first one boy, then the other—as did dreams of ghost ships and underworld rides. Dreams of a world surely different from this one—a stripping back to reveal the bones and flesh, the red muscle of a world not at all like the image of the one we believe we have crafted above.
Unsettling dreams to be shaken off, with difficulty, upon awakening. Surely all below is only imagined, she tried to tell herself, only fantasy. Surely there is only one world.
The berries they brought home were sweet and delicious, ripe and plump. The dreams of gas flares and simmering underworld fires, only images, possessed nothing of the berries’ reality. Only one world, she told herself. There is nothing to be frightened of, no need to be cautious about anything.
The cracks and fissures of chance, ruptures at the earth’s surface claiming the three of them, as all must be claimed—those crevasses manifesting as random occurrence but operating surely just beneath the surface in intricate balancings and alignments of fates as crafted and organic as the movements of the tides themselves. There was a school Halloween dance that autumn, which Kirby was unable to attend due to a family matter that had arisen just that week. The crack or crevice, seemingly without meaning.
It was a low-key evening filled with chaperones, and with the elementary and middle schools combining, that evening, with the high schoolers. Twister and pin the tail on the donkey, Bingo and bobbing for apples. There was a haunted house, and masked children of all ages in all manner of costumes ran laughing and shouting through the school hallways, and the high schoolers hung back for a while but then gave themselves over to the fun.
There was dancing in the basketball gym, with some of the children and adults still wearing their masks and costumes, though many of the teenagers had taken off their masks and were now only half animal—tiger, fairy, princess, gorilla. Their faces were flushed, and the discrepancy between what their hormones were telling them—destroy, rebel—and what the rigid bars of their culture were telling them—no, no, no—was for the most lively of them like a pressure cooker.
Annie was dressed as a princess, and Richard a red devil. They sat for a while and watched the other children dance. Annie waited and was aware of no pressure. It’s possible that she could afford to step aside of the drumming, mounting pressure her peers were feeling because most days she had Richard and Kirby in her life, and Richard at her side, much as a young girl might have a pet bear or lion in her backyard. She turned and smiled at Richard, serene, while the music played and the little monsters ran shrieking, bumping against their legs. The scent of sugar in the air. Around them the dense aura of all the other itchy, troubled, angst-bound teenagers, wanting sex, wanting power, wanting God, wanting salvation—wanting home and hearth, and yet also wanting the open road.
There was no need yet for Annie to participate in any of that confusion. Everything else around her was swirling and tattering, but she was grounded and centered, and she was loved deeply, without reason. She smiled, watching Richard watch the dancers. She reached over and took his hand in the darkness and held it while they watched, and as they felt the palpable fretting and shifting of their peers. It was lonely, being sunk down to the bottom of the world, she thought, but comfortable, even wonderful, to have each other during such a journey.
“What do you think Kirby’s doing right now?” she asked, twisting his hand in hers.
They left the party and went out for an ice cream sundae and enjoyed it leisurely, watching the rest of the city zoom by on the neon strip of Westheimer Road, a busy Friday night, hearing even in the restaurant the whooping and shouting from open car windows and the screeching of tires, and gears accelerating.
They enjoyed the meal with no conscious forethought of where they were going next—though if anyone had asked them, they would have been able to answer immediately; and after a little while Kirby drove past, finished with his family engagement. He saw Richard’s car, and pulled in and joined them.
With Richard and Annie still wearing their costumes, they journeyed east, riding with the windows down as ever, and with the radio playing, but with a seriousness, a quietness, the three of them knowing with adults’ wisdom they were ascending now into the world ahead, as if to some upper level, a level that would sometimes be exciting but where more frequent work would be the order of the day: less dreaming and more awareness and consciousness. Carve and scribe, hammer and haul. Almost like a war. As if this unasked-for war must be, and was, the price of all their earlier peace, and all their peace to come.
Richard and Annie held hands again in the car on the way east, and the three of them knew by the way the crane’s allure was dying within them as they drew nearer to that sulfurous, wavering glow on the horizon that they would soon be moving on to other things, and in other directions. It was almost as if now—for the first time—they were pushing into a heavy headwind.
It was getting late. The city’s children had finished their trick-or-treating. As they passed through a small wooded suburb sandwiched between shopping malls, they stopped and went up and gathered several stubbed candle remnants from the scorched mouths of sagging, sinking, barely glimmering pumpkins.
One pumpkin had already been taken out to the sidewalk for the garbage men to pick up the next morning, and they resurrected that one, placed it on the front seat between Annie and Kirby and fed it a new candle, coaxing it back to brightness as one might offer a cigarette to an injured or dying soldier.
They rode through the city and then east toward the refineries, with their runty candles wax-welded all over the front and back dashboards, the windows rolled almost all the way up to keep from extinguishing the little flames—the light on their faces wavering as they passed through the night (to people in passing cars and trucks, it must have seemed as if Kirby and Richard and Annie were floating, so disorienting was the sight of the big car filled with all those candles)—and they kept heading east, toward the flutterings and spumes of the refineries’ fires, toward that strange glow that was like daytime at night.
That night Annie and Richard went down into the bathysphere, and into the river, together, with Kirby, above them, working the manual crank on the crane like a puppeteer. They were still wearing their costumes and there was barely room for them to squeeze in together. Annie’s satin dress spread across the whole bench, and Richard’s devil’s tail got folded beneath them. He rode with his arm around her, and hers around him, for stability as well as courage, as the globe was lifted, swaying, from the earth—that first familiar and sickening feeling of powerlessness as the ground fell away below them—and they rode with an array of candles in front of them.
Their faces were almost touching. This, Richard was thinking, this is how I want it always to be.
They glimpsed the stars as Kirby levered them out over the river, and then there was the thrill of free fall—“Hold on!” Richard shouted, covering her with both arms and shielding her head—and the concussion of iron meeting water, the great splash. Candles went everywhere, spilling warm wax on thei
r hands and wrists, their faces—one landed on Annie’s dress and burned a small hole into it—and once underwater, the globe righted itself and settled in for the brief ride downstream.
With the candles that were still burning they relit the scattered ones and leaned forward, and cheek to cheek they studied the interior of the foul river as they tumbled through its center.
“What if the cable snapped loose,” Richard asked, “when we hit the water so hard?”
Not to be outdone, Annie said, “What if some old bum, as a Halloween joke, sawed the cable down to its last fiber, so that when we reach the end it’ll snap?”
There was a long silence as Richard’s imagination seized and worked with that one for a while, until it became too true, and he sought to change the outcome.
“What if we were stranded on a desert island?” Richard asked.
“How about a forested island?”
“Right,” Richard said. “What if? And what if we had only a little while to live?”
“The last man and woman on earth,” Annie said.
“Right.” Man and woman. The phrase sounded so foreign and distant: light-years away, still.
“Well,” said Annie, “let’s wait and see.” But her arm tightened around his, and Richard found himself urging the cable to break, break, break.
The cable reached full stretch; there was a bumping, and then the globe was swept up and out, tumbling them onto their backs—as if a carpet had been pulled from beneath their feet—and again the candles fell over on them, as did the hot wax, and this time no candles stayed lit, so that they shuddered in darkness, feeling the waves, the intimate urgings of the river, washing over and around their tiny iron shell.