by Rick Bass
With Penny’s help, I was able to penetrate lands no one else even knew existed, and to rearrange property interests, manufacturing wealth. Only I knew of the world to come, and Penny kept the evidence of that world hidden away for me. In that, then, I had the knowledge of a prophet.
I don’t know what Penny thought each time I drove away, headed back home. It’s possible some hope remained in her, glimmering. It’s possible she wished I would change my mind, come to my senses. But I know what I believed, which was that I existed without accounting, and that the road was free and open before me.
Genevieve had a life beyond mine. She welcomed me whenever I returned but did not come looking for me. She didn’t even ask me about work. Our time together was always about the moment, and the body, and the resting afterward.
I remember the first few months, when our senses were still aflame with the newness of each other, that time when, scientists tell us, the addicting chemical of dopamine pulses from our mind furnaces, a great outwelling from the pleasure dome of the brain running in ribbons through the blood, with nothing else in the world but that sweet chemistry. Even hippie Genevieve, in all her coolness, was burning with it.
“Do you want me?” she asked late one night. We were in her big bed, had loved again sometime earlier. The lamp was still on, appearing sulfur-tinted, as if from a century ago.
“I don’t know,” I said carefully. What I meant was Maybe. What I meant was Yes.
“I want a lot of things,” I said.
I felt more than heard an exhalation leave her, and though she was not that kind of person, it seemed she might be counting to ten. Finally, she said, “Like what?”
“That’s not right,” I said. “What I meant was, I want everything to stay like it is forever. Don’t you?”
She started to cry, an event as unfamiliar and startling to me as it must have been to her; she stopped, then composed herself with a speed that could come only from anger, and I think that she had cried not at my answers, but that she had asked the question at all.
“Come on,” she said, reaching for my hand as if for a child’s.
Where had the anger gone? Would I see it again? She was forgiving me.
We dressed and went out into the darkness, and in the way that time always swirled and eddied whenever I was at her house, I saw it was not the middle of the night as I’d imagined, but nearing dawn.
We walked out across the furrowed field behind her house, past her large garden, stepping over each loam-scented soft row, crushing little cotyledons of cotton and soybean with each step.
It was half a mile to the big trees along the bayou, where the silt turned to swamp. Wild magnolias, tupelo, cypress, black gum, and, on hummocks, live oaks, with curtains of Spanish moss hanging to the ground. We were still holding hands, and she hurried now, as if purging the sadness of that short time ago.
We left the field then and went into the woods, and the steaming fog. The wild turkeys on their roosts were beginning to gobble. Genevieve found a hummock to sit on, and we edged in shoulder to shoulder, and then she called to the turkeys, luring them to us.
We could hear in the silence following her call their suspicion, but after that, when they began to call back, we could hear their hunger. The woods changed to the color of pale milk, and the turkeys marched toward us, their gobbling coming from all directions.
We sat motionless. The fog was like smoke, a land before time, and when the gobbling grew so loud that we could hear nothing else, at last we began to see them, first one gobbler, his tail spread wide, chestnut red and gold, head bright blue like a beacon, strutting and spinning in the clearing before us, and then another, and another.
A single file of hens followed behind them, clucking and yelping, moving like a military procession, past our hiding area: a fourth, a fifth, then a nation of them, serenading, and still we didn’t move, not even when the mosquitoes found us. The sun came up orange through the swamp and ignited the tendrils of hanging moss, each strand a burning filament, and it did the same to the turkeys’ tails, which were now fans of flame.
While such beauty presented itself to us, the rest of the world slept.
The mosquitoes grew larger, swollen. We had to shoo the ones around our eyes. The blemish in the garden. A tiny smudge of blood, and only the slowest gesture, but the turkeys saw it, and, refocusing, saw us, and dropped their heads and fans and ran clucking back into the forest, then flew, their wings flapping like carpets being whacked.
Genevieve and I stood on stiff legs and walked back across the field in the warming day, in the broad sun, and I fixed a big breakfast of eggs and Parmesan cheese, grilled some toast in the skillet. After breakfast she went out to the hammock and lit up, and I kissed her goodbye and drove on to work in Jackson as if it were just another day.
I could look at a quitclaim deed and know in a glance what had happened; could tell, almost as if by divination, why it had been filed, however complicated the assignment of rights. But the amplitudes of the human heart, no matter whether hidden or exposed, I was less adept at reading. The heart seemed always in motion, like something lost and wandering, searching always for a home.
The more time that passed without my getting Velma Carter’s lease, the more certain the geologists became that there was a vast dome of oil beneath her old leaning house on the hill. Late that September, Homer and I went for a walk downtown at lunch, an event so unprecedented I worried I was about to be fired.
He was too smart for that. He needed me, and it was fair to say I needed him. I had a comfortable life, despite working those long hours in the field while also holding down my office hours in Jackson. It wasn’t a pace I could sustain forever, but I had gotten pretty used to claiming, hour by hour, my unofficial comp time on those mornings when I stayed over at Genevieve’s after getting in late from the road, sleeping in a bit, and then lounging in the hammock a while longer.
“We’ve got to have the Carter lease,” he said. “I have to drill now.” A company from Arkansas had just signed a joint venture to begin exploring the basin, he said, and he couldn’t risk them finding out where we were leasing. We had to have the Carter prospect now, before it was too late.
I had not told him about Penny. I couldn’t tell him not to worry, that the leases he had paid for had not been filed and were instead hidden away in a drawer, though he might have appreciated the subterfuge.
“You’ve been living a life of balance,” he said. We weren’t out on a true walk, I realized, but were instead making a lap around the block. “It’s good that you have a girlfriend and get to spend time with her,” he said. “The days go by fast. But I am going to ask that you get the Carter lease before taking off any more time from work.”
The day was warm and we walked in the bright light; our black shoes clacked on the sidewalk, our socks shimmered almost iridescent. We walked a few steps in silence as I did the math—could I quit and still maintain my life of leisure?—an equation Homer himself had no doubt already calculated.
“All right,” I said. “What’s the most I can offer her?”
He gave me a number five times what we had ever paid. We would essentially be giving her the oil as well as the cash. It made no sense, unless we could make it up from other wells on the perimeter. I had never known him to be so addicted before, and it unsettled me. It was his money; what did I care? But it bothered me nonetheless.
“I’m not sure it’s about the money,” I said.
We had completed our first lap and he paused, not having anticipated the need for a second. A sheen of perspiration limned his big balding forehead; his wire-rimmed silver glasses looked hot on his face. I knew enough about him to understand he could turn savage quickly. Yet I saw him also for the first time as the old man he was fast becoming. It was as if he were sliding down a steep slope into a pit, until one day he would reach the bottom and curl up and close his eyes to the bright wonders of a world he had never noticed. The first few shovelfuls of earth would d
rum onto his velvet-lined box while his associates stood around in their suits thinking about their upcoming tee times, or about market futures, or about more prospects, or about their fractured families, and the confusing architecture of numbness that was their lives.
I missed Genevieve, on that second lap. I felt, with an emotion close to panic, that I would do almost anything in order to have a little more time in the hammock with her.
“All right,” I said again, my voice thick. Homer was sweating like a horse now. We were halfway around our second lap, and it was strange to realize that although he held power over me, I would bury him. “But she might not want to lease for any price,” I said. “Or her family might not. I could try for non compos mentis.”
We rounded the final corner back to the office. Homer stopped and stared down at the sidewalk as if he could divine some movement beneath the surface. “You’re not hearing what I’m saying,” he said. He looked up, and I saw that although he was old, he was not yet weak. “Do what you have to do,” he said.
Several days later I went back to Velma’s. I arrived in the afternoon, and there was a different energy outside the house. Young people were coming and going—two boys, one scrawny and spindly, the other obese, trudged alongside the house half clad in football uniforms, plastic gear flapping—and Dexter was out in the yard, raking mounds of damp leaves into a burn pile.
Billows of purple smoke seeped from the pile, and the scent, while not entirely pleasing, plumbed in me the depths of nostalgia. When I asked if I could go in and visit with Velma again, Dexter scowled at me so darkly I thought she might have died.
His face was smeared with ash and charcoal and his eyes were watering from the smoke.
I saw now that the burn pile appeared to be a kind of house cleaning. A plastic purse, a bowling bag, and other man-made items. As the vinyl of the bowling bag melted, revealing the glowing ball, it looked like a skull, and, horrifically, a pair of women’s shoes protruded from the bottom of the pile.
She had died and Dexter was cremating her, I realized, and then I had the thought that she hadn’t died of natural causes, and that they were disposing of her.
He continued to look at me with hostility, and I had the do-gooder’s impulse to rush over and grab Velma by the ankles and pull her from beneath the leaves. She might recover. I wanted to believe it was possible.
Dexter turned from me and poked at the base of the burn pile with his rake, stirring the old lady’s white shoes, and I was further sickened to see that they were no longer attached to her. Too late.
It was clear he had been planning a conflagration—buckets of water stood at the ready—but the fire was barely smoldering, just a slow gnawing at the base, a few bright coals gleaming like jewels. A hiss emanated from the pile, and a sound like moaning.
And yet in that moment I felt hope. Perhaps the pile was only rubbish after all, and I had let my imagination fly away.
Dexter gestured to me to go into the house, as if I might find what it was I was looking for there. And in the way the world sometimes mystically announces its truths, I understood I would finally get the lease. That my long-suffering endurance would be rewarded.
I went inside, where Velma was absent from her perch, the pallet nowhere in sight. Household members were arranged in their usual states of numbness bordering on narcolepsy. I greeted them like a member of the family and, without asking, went up the rickety stairs to find her. I did not want her to be gone, did not want this family of miscreants to have terminated her, yet I knew also I would have been sickened for the lease to have slipped through my fingers, and so I resolved to accept whatever lay in store.
And yet as I ascended those raggedy stairs, I was certain what I was doing was wrong, and it wounded my spirit. Something was seeping out of me, and I did not know how to stop it.
Upstairs, I went from room to room. Some had crusty food bowls in them, dirty utensils, half-empty bottles; there were broken windowpanes, bird feathers, cobwebs. Drop cloths and sheets had been draped over some of the furniture. Cat feces peppered the hallway, and the stench of the bathroom was that of heated ammonia. I passed by an open window and looked down at the burn pile again, its plumes of resolute smoke, the glimmerings at its base. Those small flames would never consume all of the wet leaves, and I knew the burn pile would be there forever, one more landmark to sloth and rot.
The farther view outside was another matter: it was beautiful from the second floor, up above the canopy. Some of the leaves were off the trees, though enough remained to yield a mosaic of red and gold, a beauty that could soothe a soul in turmoil.
I found Velma, alive, in one of the unused rooms on the front side of the house. She was still on the pallet. They had placed her by another of the south-facing windows, presumably so she might live out her last days milking the weak warmth of the autumn sun, like a basking cat.
The window was dusty, which made the light softer, and in the instant I opened the door and saw Velma there, all my worry went away, and the stain on my heart fled. I was being given another chance at purity. I could yet turn away from my quarry.
There was love, there in the room, and I stepped in and closed the door behind me, wanting to hoard it, fearful it might leak out. It was coming from her in pulses like solar flares, a mother’s love: sweet, calm, steadying. That room was a safe place to be. I pulled the sheet off a wingback chair and sat down.
Then, as quickly as the feeling had appeared, it ebbed. There could be no mistaking that Velma was dying.
She turned her head to behold me, and I studied her, trying to discern what she knew. What she could still comprehend, what she could remember of the past, and even perhaps glimpse of the future.
For a moment it felt as if we were communicating, as if a few neural pathways of electricity still coursed through her. I believed she knew I wanted the lease, and she was willing to discuss it; willing, perhaps, to negotiate.
I started to speak but lost my nerve. I just sat there, watching and waiting. Her family needed to be present for such a discussion.
I stood and took a Kleenex from my pocket and scrubbed one of the windowpanes, again admiring the view. In the distance a few of the gas flares burned, visible even in the daylight. They were our wells, our fields, and they were not so far away.
I don’t know why, because I had more pressing matters at hand, but in that moment I found myself thinking of Penny. I knew her crush would subside, that she would not wait forever for me to show interest, and that I was using Penny just as surely as Velma’s family was using her.
That awareness made me homesick again for Genevieve, and for the elemental quality, of our leisure; but staring at Velma, I felt for the first time that these days of leisure might recede. They would burn brightly until one day, perhaps soon, they would be gone.
I patted Velma on the arm. With great effort, she turned her head toward me again. She smiled weakly this time. I like to think that in that moment she had changed her mind, close as she was now to the veil, and had decided to give me the lease.
In any case, I took that smile as a sign and went downstairs to find Dexter and tell him we wouldn’t need the non compos mentis, that Velma had decided to lease. That we would be paying good money, more than we had previously discussed, and that I needed witnesses. The Fayette County courthouse held a small handful of scattered old deeds and titles marked non compos mentis. I was glad not to have my name attached to such a document.
I handed Dexter the bank draft—forty thousand dollars to pierce a little hole in the top of the hill—and his first question to me after he had taken it and stared at it was “Is she dead?”
“No,” I said, but thought that we had better hurry.
We trooped back up the stairs. I have no idea what Velma thought when she heard the heavy boots. Dexter smelled so strongly of the smoldering-leaf smoke that she might have feared the house itself was on fire, if she still had any thoughts.
I sat down beside her and reiter
ated the terms: three years and a three-sixteenths royalty, in addition to the forty grand.
The light outside was fading fast. I felt as if I were reading her the last rites and that a candle should be wavering. The other denizens of the household had gathered to view the momentous occasion that would slide into family lore, and whether they perceived the momentousness to be the changing of Velma’s mind after a long lifetime of resistance, or simply a grand bilking, I did not know.
I placed the lease on a clipboard before her ghostly arm, then handed her a pen, which she took and held with the deep familiarity of a lifelong writer of letters. I imagined she might have boxes of them up in the attic, the one- and two-cent stamps mouse-nibbled—correspondences with her mother and grandmother, whose mother in turn would surely have been a slave owner.
I wasn’t doing anything wrong, I told myself.
I did it, I thought, as I watched Dexter guide his grandmother’s nearly limp hand into a spidery signature—had she fallen asleep midsignature?—but I did not feel the victory I had imagined. Instead, I felt the sickness of shame, and even fear, as if with her signature we were setting in motion some indictment of all our days to come—an assignation that would be impossible to overturn.
The others clumped back down the steps, the old house shaking with their descent—its shell so flimsy that it seemed a single storm might level it to kindling. I sat up there with Velma a while longer, believing that as long as the husk of her still had a heartbeat, and as long as there was respiration, there had to be trickles of memory, and consciousness, creeping through the hills and ravines and blue ridges of her wizened brain, and that it would be that way until the light went all the way out.
It was indulgent of me—seeking absolution so immediately—but I told her things were going to be better. I told her she had made the right choice, taking care of her family—her loving family!—and there would be oil, maybe vast stores of it, beneath her hilltop house. That they would all be cared for after this, forever and ever, and times would get better, not worse.