by Rick Bass
We began to haunt the auction barns on Wednesdays and Thursdays, even before we had our driver’s licenses—skipping school and walking there, or riding our bikes—and we began to scrimp and save, to buy at those auctions the cheapest cattle available: young calves, newly weaned, little multicolored lightweights of uncertain pedigree, costing seventy or eighty dollars each.
We watched the sleek velvety gray Brahma calves, so clearly superior, pass on to other bidders for $125, or $150, and longed for such an animal; but why spend that money on one animal when for the same amount we could get two?
After parting with our money we would go claim our prize. Sometimes another rancher offered to put our calf in the back of his truck or trailer and ferry it home for us, though other times we hobbled the calf with ropes and chains and led it, wild and bucking, down the side of the highway, with the deadweight of a log or creosote-soaked railroad tie attached behind it like an anchor to keep the animal—far stronger, already, than the two of us combined—from breaking loose and galloping away unowned and now unclaimed, disappearing into the countryside, our investment now no more than a kite snatched by the wind.
We gripped the calf’s leash and dug in our heels, and were half hauled home by the calf itself. In the creature’s terror it would be spraying and jetting algae-green plumes of excrement in all directions, which we would have to dodge, and were anyone to seek to follow us—to counsel us, perhaps, to turn away from our chosen path, still experimental at this point—the follower would have been able to track us by the scuffed-up heel marks and divots of where we had resisted the animal’s pull, and by the violent fans of green-drying-to-brown diarrhea: the latter an inauspicious sign for an animal whose existence was predicated on how much weight it would be able to gain, and quite often the reason these marginal calves had been sent to the auction in the first place.
Arriving finally at Moxley’s grandfather’s farm, bruised and scratched, and with the calf in worse condition, we would turn it loose into the wilderness of weeds and brambles circumscribed by the sagging fence.
We had attempted, in typical adolescent half-assed fashion, to shore up the fence with loose coils of scrap wire, lacking expertise with the fence stretcher, and in some places where we had run out of wire we had used the orange nylon twine gathered from bales of hay, and lengths of odd-sorted rope, to weave a kind of cat’s cradle, a spider web of thin restraint, should the calf decide to try and leave our woolly, brushy, brittle pasture.
We had woven the fence with vertical stays also, limbs and branches sawed or snapped to a height of about four feet, in the hopes that these might help to provide a visual deterrent, so that the curving, collapsing fence looked more like the boundaries of a trap or funnel constructed by Paleolithics in an attempt to veer driven game toward slaughter.
We had money only for cattle or fence, but not both. Impulsive, eager, impatient, we chose cattle, and the cattle slipped through our ramshackle fence like the wind itself—sometimes belly-wriggling beneath it, other times vaulting it like kangaroos.
Usually, the calves went straight through the weakened fence, popping loose the rusted fence staples and shattering the leaning fence posts and crude branches stacked and piled as barricades. Sometimes the calves, fresh from the terror and trauma of their drive from auction, never slowed when first released through the gate at Old Ben’s farm, but kept running, galloping with their heads lowered all the way down the hill, building more speed, and they would hit the fence square on.
More often than not, they sailed right on through it like a football player charging through the paper stretched between goalposts before a football game, though occasionally they bounced back in an awkward cartwheel before scrambling to their feet and running laterally until they found a weaker seam and slipped through it not like anything of this world of flesh and bone, but like magicians, vanishing.
When that happened, we had to leap on the old red tractor, starting it with a belch and clatter that frightened the calf into even wilder flight; and with Moxley driving the old tractor flat-out in high gear, and me standing upright with a boot planted wobbily on each of the sweeping wide rear fenders, riding the tractor like a surfer and swinging a lariat (about which I knew nothing), we would go racing down the hill after the calf, out onto the highway, the tractor roaring and the calf running as if from some demon of hell that had been designed solely to pursue that one calf, and which would never relent.
We never caught the calves, and only on the rarest of occasions were we ever able to draw near enough to one—wearing it down with our relentlessness—to even attempt a throw of the rope, which was never successful.
Usually the animal would feint and weave at the last instant, as the tractor and whizzing gold lariat bore down on it, and would shoot or crash through another fence, or cross a ditch and vault a fence strung so tightly that as the calf’s rear hoofs clipped the fence going over, the vibration would emit a high taut hum, which we could hear even over the sound of the tractor.
It was like the sound of a fishing line snapping, and by the time we found an unlocked gate to that pasture the calf would have escaped to yet another field, or might be down in some creek bottom, reverting to instincts more feral than those of even the deer and turkeys that frequented those creeks; and we would scour the surrounding hills for all the rest of that day—sometimes pursuing, for a short distance, a calf that might look like ours, until that calf’s owner would come charging out on his own tractor, shouting and cursing, angling to intercept us like a jouster.
Old Ben fell too ill to drive and then became a problem while Moxley was in school; he had begun to wander out into the same fields in which the rogue calves had been released, and was trying to escape his lifelong home, though he was too feeble to bash or batter his way through the patchwork fence, and instead endeavored to climb over it.
Even on the instances when he made good his escape, he snagged his shirt or pants on a barb and left behind flag-size scraps of bright fabric fluttering in the breeze, and we were able to track him that way, driving the roads in his old station wagon, searching for him.
Often, Old Ben lay down in a ditch, trembling and exhausted from his travels, and pulled a piece of cardboard over him like a tent to shield him from the heat, and we would pass on by him, so that it might be a day or two before we or a neighbor could find him.
Other times, however, Old Ben became so entangled in his own fence that he would be unable to pull free, and when we came home from school we would see him down there, sometimes waving and struggling though other times motionless, spent, with his arms and legs akimbo, and his torn jacket and jeans looking like the husk from some chrysalis or other emerging insect; and we’d go pluck him from those wires, and Moxley would mend his torn jacket with the crude loops of his own self-taught sewing: but again and again Old Ben sought to flow through those fences.
There were also days, however, when Old Ben was fine, fit as a fiddle; times when the disintegrating fabric of his old war-torn mind, frayed by mustard gas and the general juices of war’s horror, shifted like tiny tectonic movements, reassembling into the puzzle-piece grace his mind had possessed earlier in life—the grandfather Moxley had known and loved, and who loved him, and who had raised him. On those occasions it felt as if we had taken a step back in time. It was confusing to feel this, for it was pleasant; and yet, being young, we were eager to press on. We knew we should be enjoying the time with Old Ben—that he was not long for the world, and that our time with him, particularly Moxley’s, was precious and rare, more valuable than any gold, or certainly any rogue cattle.
On the nights when the past reassembled itself in Old Ben and he was healthy again, even if only for a while, the three of us ate dinner together. We sat on the back porch feeling the Gulf breezes coming from more than a hundred miles to the southeast, watching the tall ungrazed grass before us bend in oceanic waves, with little gusts and accelerations stirring the grass in streaks and ribbons, looking briefly
like the braids of a rushing river, or as if animals in hiding were running along those paths, just beneath the surface, unseen.
We grilled steaks on the barbecue, roasted golden ears of corn, and drank fresh-squeezed lemonade, to which Ben was addicted. “Are these steaks from your cattle?” he would ask us, cutting into his meat and examining each bite as if there might be some indication of ownership within; and when we lied and told him yes, he seemed pleased, as if we had amounted to something in the world, and as if we were no longer children. He would savor each bite, as if he could taste some intangible yet exceptional quality.
We kept patching and repatching the ragged-ass fence, lacing it back together with twine and scraps of rope, with ancient twists of baling wire, and with coat hangers; propping splintered shipping pallets against the gaps, stacking them and leaning them here and there in an attempt to plug the many holes. (The calves ended up merely using these pallets as ladders and springboards.)
In his own bedraggled state, however, Ben saw none of the failures. “That’s what being a cattleman’s about,” he said—he who had never owned a cow in his life. “Ninety-five percent of it is the grunt work, and five percent is buying low and selling high. I like how you boys work at it,” he said, and he never dreamed or knew that in our own half-assedness we were making much more work for ourselves than if we’d done the job right the first time.
After we got our driver’s licenses we used Ben’s old station wagon, and after getting him to bed, and hasping the doors shut as if stabling a wild horse, and latching the windows from the outside, we left the darkened farmhouse and headed for the lights of the city, which cast a golden half-dome high into the scudding clouds.
It was a vast glowing ball of light, seeming close enough that we could have walked or ridden our bikes to reach it: and driving Ben’s big station wagon, with its power steering and gas-sucking engine, was like piloting a rocket ship. There were no shades of gray, out in the country like that: there was only the stillness of night, with crickets chirping, and fireflies, and the instrument panels on the dashboard were the only light of fixed reference as we powered through that darkness, hungry for that nearing dome of city light. The gauges and dials before us were nearly as mysterious to us as the instrument panel of a jet airplane, and neither Moxley nor I paid much attention to them. For the most part, he knew only the basics: how to aim the car, steering it crudely like the iron gunboat it was, and how to use the accelerator and the brakes.
And after but a few miles of such darkness there would suddenly be light, blazes of it hurled at us from all directions—grids and window squares and spears of light, sundials and radials of inflorescence and neon; and we were swallowed by it, were born into it, and suddenly we could see before us the hood of the old Detroit iron horse that had carried us into the city and swallowed us, as the city, and Westheimer Avenue, seemed to be swallowing the car, and we were no longer driving so much as being driven.
All-night gas stations, all-night grocery stores, movie theaters, restaurants, massage parlors, oil-change garages, floral shops, apartment complexes, dentists’ offices, car dealerships—it was all jammed shoulder to shoulder, there was no zoning, and though we had seen it all before in the daytime, and were accustomed to it, it looked entirely different at night: alluring, even beautiful, rather than squalid and chaotic.
The neon strip fascinated us as might a carnival, but what most caught our imagination on these night sojourns was not the glamorous, exotic urban core but the strange seams of disintegrating roughness on the perimeters, pockets toward and around which the expanding city spilled and flowed like lava: little passed-by islands of the past, not unlike our own on the western edge. We passed through the blaze of light and strip malls, the loneliness of illuminated commerce, and came out the other side, on the poorer eastern edge, where the high-voltage power grids were clustered, and the multinational refineries.
Here the air was dense with the odor of burning plastic, vaporous benzenes and toluenes adhering to the palate with every breath, and the night-fog sky glowed with blue, pink, and orange flickers from the flares of waste gas jetting from a thousand smokestacks. The blaze of commerce faded over our shoulders and behind us, and often we found ourselves driving through neighborhoods that seemed to be sinking into the black soil, the muck of peat, as if pressed down by the immense weight of the industrial demands placed upon that spongy soil—gigantic tanks and water towers and chemical vats, strange intestinal folds and coils of tarnished aluminum towering above us, creeping through the remnant forests like nighttime serpents.
Snowy egrets and night herons passed through the flames, or so it seemed, and floated amid the puffs of pollution as serenely as if in a dream of grace; and on those back roads, totally lost, splashing through puddles axle deep and deeper, and thudding over potholes big enough to hold a bowling ball, Moxley would turn the lights off and navigate the darkened streets in that manner, passing through pools of rainbow-colored poisonous light and wisps and tatters of toxic fog as if gliding with the same grace and purpose as the egrets above us.
Many of the rotting old homes had ancient live oaks out in front, their yards bare due to the trees’ complete shading of the soil. In the rainy season, the water stood a foot deep in the streets, so that driving up and down them was more like poling the canals of Venice than driving; and the heat from our car’s undercarriage hissed steam as we plowed slowly up and down.
We were drawn to see these rougher, ranker places at night, and yet we wanted to see them in the full light of day also; and when we traveled to these eastern edges during school, while taking a long lunch break or cutting classes, we discovered little hanging-on businesses run out of those disintegrating houses, places where old men and women still made tortillas, or repaired leather boots and work shoes, or did drywall masonry, or made horseshoes by hand, even though there were increasingly few horses and ever more cars and trucks, especially trucks, as urban Texas began the calcification of its myths in full earnestness.
There were places where a patch of corn might exist next to a ten-story office building, places where people still hung their clothes on the line to dry, and little five- and ten-acre groves in which there might still exist a ghost herd of deer. Ponds in which there might still lurk giant, sullen, doomed catfish, even with the city’s advancing hulk blocking now partially the rising and setting of the sun.
Through such explorations we found the Goat Man as surely and directly as if he had been standing on the roof of his shed, calling to us with some foxhunter’s horn, leading us straight to the hand-painted rotting plywood sign tilted in the mire outside his hovel.
BABY CLAVES, $15, read the sign, each letter painted a different color, as if by a child. We parked in his muddy driveway, the low-slung station wagon dragging its belly over the corrugated troughs of countless such turnings-around, wallowing and slithering and splashing up to the front porch of a collapsing clapboard shed-house that seemed to be held up by nothing more than the thick braids and vines of dead ivy.
Attached to the outside of the hovel was a jerry-built assemblage of corrals and stables, ramshackle slats of mixed-dimension scrap lumber, from behind which came an anguished cacophony of bleats and bawls and whinnies and outright bloodcurdling screams, as we got out of the car and sought to make our way dry-footed from one mud hummock to the next, up toward the sagging porch, to inquire about the baby claves, hoping very much that they were indeed calves, and not some odd bivalve oyster we’d never heard of.
We peered through dusty windows (some of the panes were cracked, held together with fraying duct tape) and saw that many of the rooms were filled with tilted mounds of newspapers so ancient and yellowing that they had begun to turn into mulch.
An old man answered the door when we knocked, the man blinking not so much as if having been just awakened but as if instead rousing himself from some other communion or reverie, some lost-world voyage. He appeared to be in his sixties, with a long wild silver bear
d and equally wild silver hair, in the filaments of which fluttered a few moths, as if he were an old bear that had just been roused from his work of snuffling through a rotting log in search of grubs.
His teeth were no better than the slats that framed the walls of his ragged corrals, and, barefoot, he was dressed in only a pair of hole-sprung, oil-stained forest-green work pants, on which we recognized the dried-brown flecks of manure splatter, and an equally stained sleeveless ribbed underwear T-shirt that had once been white but was now the color of his skin, and appeared to have been on his body so long as to become a second kind of skin—one that, if it were ever removed, might peel off with it large patches of his original birth skin.
The odor coming from the house was quite different from the general barnyard stench of feces, and somehow even more offensive.
Despite the general air of filth and torpor radiating from the house and its host, however, his carriage and bearing were erect, almost military—as if our presence had electrified him with hungry possibility; as if we were the first customers, or potential customers, he might have encountered in so long a time that he had forgotten his old patterns of defeat.
When he first spoke, however, to announce his name, the crispness of his posture was undercut somewhat by the shining trickle of tobacco drool that escaped through some of the gaps in his lower teeth, like a slow release of gleaming venom.
“Sloat,” he said, and at first I thought it was some language of his own making: that he was attempting to fix us, tentatively, with a curse. “Heironymus Sloat,” he said, reaching out a gnarly spittle- and mucus-stained hand. We exchanged looks of daring and double-daring, and finally Moxley offered his own pale and unscarred hand.
“Come in,” Sloat said, making a sweeping gesture that was both grand and familial—as if, horrifically, he recognized in us some kindred spirit—and despite our horror, after another pause, we followed him in.