by Rick Bass
Gradually they broke the surface—through their portal, still lying on their backs and arm in arm, but relaxed now, they could see the plumes and spray of water as they were birthed back to the surface; they could see the crooked, jarring skyline of the refinery fires, and farther above the dim stars just beyond the reach of the gold-green luminous puffs of steam that marked the factories.
There was not much time now. Soon they would be up and free of the river, swinging, and then Kirby would land them on the beach. They were hot now, sweating, and there was barely any air left. Annie leaned over and found Richard’s face with her hands, and kissed him slowly, with both hands still on his face. He kissed her back—took her face in his hands and tried to shift in order to cover her with his body, but there was no room—for a moment, they became tangled, cross-elbowed and leg-locked like some human Rubik’s cube. They broke off the kiss quickly, and now there was no air at all—as if they had each sucked the last of it from out of the other—but they could feel the craft settling onto the sand beach now and knew that in scant moments Kirby would be climbing down and coming toward them, that there would be the rap of his knuckles on the iron door, and then the creak of the hatch being opened.
Time for one more kiss, demure and tender now, and then the gritty rasp of the hatch: the counterclockwise twist, and then the lid being lifted, and Kirby’s anxious face appearing before them, and beyond him, those dim stars, almost like the echoes or spent husks of stars. Cool October night sliding in over their sweaty faces.
Richard helped Annie out—her dress was a charred mess—and then climbed out behind her, marveling at how delicious even the foul refinery air tasted in their freedom. Kirby looked at them both curiously and started to speak, but then could think of nothing to say, and he felt a strange and great sorrow.
They left the bathysphere as it was, sitting with the hatch opened, still attached to the crane with its steel umbilicus; for any number of reasons, none of them would ever go back; they would never see how the crane would eventually tip over on its side, half buried in silt, or how the bathysphere would become buried, too.
They rode back into the city, still in costume, silent and strangely serious, reflective on the trip home, and with the pumpkin and candles glimmering once more, and with Annie and Richard holding hands again. The candle wax was still on their faces, and it looked molten upon them in the candlelight.
On the drive home Annie peeled the candle wax from her face and then from Richard’s, and she held the pressings carefully in one hand.
When Kirby pulled up in front of her house—the living room lights still on, and one of them, mother or father, waiting up, and glancing at the clock (ten minutes past eleven, but no matter; they trusted her)—Annie leaned over and gave Richard a quick peck, and gave Kirby a look of almost sultry forgiveness, then climbed out of the big old car (they had extinguished their candles upon entering the neighborhood) and hurried up the walkway to her house, holding her long silk skirt bunched up in one hand and the candle wax pressings in another.
“Well, fuck” said Kirby, quietly, unsure of whether he was more upset about what seemed to him like Annie’s sudden choice or about the fracturing that now existed between him and his friend. The imbalance, after so long a run, an all-but-promised run, of security.
“Shit,” said Richard, “I’m sorry.” He lifted his hands helplessly. “Can we... can it...?” Stay the same, he wanted to say, but didn’t.
They both sat there, feeling poisoned, even as the other half of Richard’s heart—as if hidden behind a mask—was leaping with electric joy.
“I’m sorry,” Richard said again.
“The two of you deserve each other,” Kirby said. “It’s just that,I hate it that...”But the words failed him; there were none, only the bad burning feeling within, and after sitting there awhile longer, they pulled away from her house and drove for a while through the night, as they used to do, back before she had begun riding with them. And for a little while they were foolish enough, and hopeful enough, to believe that it would not matter, that they could get back to that old place again, and even that that old place would be finer than any new places lying ahead of them.
The romance lasted only a little longer than did the carcass of the egret. The three of them continued to try to do new things together—they did not return to the bathysphere—though Richard and Annie went places by themselves, too, and explored, tentatively, those new territories. Always between or beneath them, however, there seemed to be a burr: not that she had made the wrong choice, but rather that some choice had been required—that she had had to turn away from one thing even in the turning-toward another—and that summer, even before the two boys, two young men, prepared to go off to college, while Annie readied herself to return for her senior year of high school, she informed Richard that she thought she would like a couple of weeks apart to think things over and to prepare for the pain of his departure. To prepare both of them.
“My God,” Richard said, “two weeks?” They had been seeing each other almost every day. Their bodies had changed, their voices had changed, as had their patterns and gestures, and even the shapes of their faces, becoming leaner and more adultlike, so that now when Annie placed the old wax pressings to her face, they no longer fit.
“I want to see what it’s like,” she said. “Maybe everything will be just fine. Maybe we’ll find out we can’t live without each other, and we’ll end up married and raising children and happy ever after. But I just want to know.”
“All right,” he said, far more frightened than he’d ever been while dangling from the crane. “All right,” he said, and it seemed to him that it was as if she were climbing into the bathysphere alone, and he marveled at her bravery and curiosity, her adventurousness, and even her wisdom.
There is still a sweetness in all three of their lives now: Kirby, with his wife and four children, in a small town north of Houston; Richard, with his wife and two children; and Annie, with her husband and five children, and, already, her first grandchild. A reservoir of sweetness, a vast subterranean vault of it, like the treasure lair of savages—the past, hidden far away in their hearts, and held, and treasured, mythic and powerful, even now.
It was exactly like the treasure-trove of wild savages, they each realize now, and for some reason—grace? simple luck?—they were able to dip down into it back then, were able to scrape out handfuls of it, gobs of it, like sugar or honey.
As if it—the discovery of that reservoir—remains with them, a power and a strength, so many years later.
And yet—they had all once been together. How can they now be apart, particularly if that reservoir remains intact, buried, and ever-replenishing?
Even now, Richard thinks they missed each other by a hair’s breadth, that some sort of fate was deflected—though how or why or what, he cannot say. He thinks it might have been one of the closest misses in the history of the world. He has no regrets, only marvels. He wonders sometimes if there are not the ghosts or husks of their other lives living still, far back in the past, or far below, or even farther out into the future: still together, and still consorting; other lives, birthed from that strange reservoir of joy and sweetness, and utter newness.
And if there are, how does he access that? Through memory? Through imagination?
Even now, he marvels at how wise they were then, and at all the paths they did not take.
Her First Elk
She had killed an elk once. She had been a young woman, just out of college—her beloved father already three years in the grave—and had set out early on opening morning, hiking uphill through a forest of huge ponderosa pines, with the stars shining like sparks through their boughs, and owls calling all around her, and her breath rising strong in puffs and clouds as she climbed, and a shimmering at the edge of her vision like the electricity in the night sky that sometimes precedes the arrival of the northern lights, or heat lightning.
The hunt was over astonishingly quick
ly; years later, she would realize that the best hunts stretch out four or five weeks, and sometimes never result in a taking. But this one had ended in the first hour, on the first day.
Even before daylight, she had caught the scent of the herd bedded down just ahead of her, a scent sweeter and ranker than that of any number of stabled horses; and creeping closer, she had been able to hear their herd sounds, their little mewings and grunts.
She crouched behind one of the giant trees, shivering from both the cold and her excitement—sharply, she had the thought that she wished her father were there with her, that one morning, to see this, to participate—and then she was shivering again, and there was nothing in her mind but elk.
Slowly, the day became light, and she sank lower into the tall grass beneath the big pines, the scent of the grass sweet upon her skin; and the lighter the day became, the farther she flattened herself down into that yellow grass.
The elk rose to their feet just ahead of her, and at first she thought they had somehow scented her, even though the day’s warming currents had not yet begun to ascend the hill—even though the last of the night’s heavier, cooling currents were still sliding in rolling waves down the mountain, the faint breeze in her face carrying the ripe scent of the herd downhill, straight to her.
But they were only grazing, wandering around now, still mewing and clucking and barking and coughing, and feeding on the same sweet-scented grass that she was hiding in. She could hear their teeth grinding as they chewed, could hear the clicking of their hoofs as they brushed against rocks.
These creatures seemed a long way from the dinners that her father had fixed out on the barbecue grill, bringing in the sizzling red meat and carving it quickly before putting it on her child’s plate and saying, “Elk”; but it was the same animal—they were all the same animal, nearly a dozen years later. Now the herd was drifting like water, or slow-flickering flames, out of the giant pines and into a stand of aspen, the gold leaves underfoot the color of their hides, and the stark white trunks of the aspen grove making it look as if the herd were trapped behind bars; though still they kept drifting, flowing in and out of and between those bars, and when Jyl saw the biggest one, the giant among them, she picked him, not knowing any better—unaware that the meat would be tougher than that of a younger animal. Raising up on one knee, she found the shot no more difficult for her than sinking a pool ball in a corner pocket: tracking with the end of her rifle and the crosshairs of the scope, the cleft formed just behind his right shoulder as he quartered away from her, she did not allow herself to be distracted by the magnificent crown of antlers atop his head—and when he stopped, in his last moment, and swung his head to face her, having sensed her presence, she squeezed the trigger as she had been taught to do back when she was a girl. The giant elk leapt hump-shouldered like a bull in a rodeo, then took a few running steps before stumbling, as if the bullet had not shredded his heart and half his lungs but had instead merely confused him.
He crashed heavily to the ground, as if attached to an invisible tether; got up, ran once more, and fell again.
The cows and calves in his herd, as well as the younger bulls, stared at him, trying to discern his meaning, and disoriented, too, by the sudden explosive sound. They stared at the source of the sound—Jyl had risen to her feet and was watching the great bull’s thrashings, wondering whether to shoot again, and still the rest of the herd stared at her with what she could recognize only as disbelief.
The bull got up and ran again. This time he did not fall, having figured out, in his grounded thrashings, how to accommodate his strange new dysfunction so as to not impede his desire, which was to escape—and with one leg and shoulder tucked high against his chest, like a man carrying a satchel, and his hind legs spread wider for stability, he galloped off, running now like a horse in hobbles and with his immense mahogany-colored rack tipped back for balance: what was once his pride and power was now a liability.
The rest of the herd turned and followed him into the timber, disappearing into the forest’s embrace almost reluctantly, still possessing somehow that air of disbelief; though once they went into the timber, they vanished completely, and for a long while she could hear the crashing of limbs and branches—as if she had unleashed an earthquake or some other world force—and the sounds grew fainter and farther, and then there was only silence.
Not knowing any better, back then, she set out after the herd rather than waiting to let the bull settle down and lie down and bleed to death. She didn’t know that if pushed a bull could run for miles with his heart in tatters, running as if on magic or spirit rather than the conventional pump-house mechanics of ventricles and aortas; that if pushed, a bull could run for months with his lungs exploded or full of blood. As if in his dying the bull were able to metamorphose into some entirely other creature, taking its air, its oxygen, straight into its blood, through its gaping, flopping mouth, as a fish does; and as if it were able still to disseminate and retrieve its blood, pressing and pulsing it to the farthest reaches of its body and back again without the use of a heart, relying instead on some kind of mysterious currents and desire—the will to cohere—far larger than its own, the blood sloshing back and forth, back and forth, willing the elk forward, willing the elk to keep being an elk.
Jyl had had it in her mind to go to the spot where the elk had first fallen—even from where she was, fifty or sixty yards distant, she could see the patch of torn-up earth—and to find the trail of blood from that point, and to follow it.
She was already thinking ahead, and looking beyond that first spot—having not yet reached it—when she walked into the barbed-wire fence that separated the national forest from the adjoining private property, posted against hunting, on which the big herd had been sequestered.
The fence was strung so tight that she bounced backwards, falling much as the elk had fallen, that first time; and in her inexperience, she had been holding the trigger on her rifle, with a shell chambered in case she should see the big bull again, and as she fell she gripped the trigger, discharging the rifle a second time, with a sound even more cavernous, in its unexpectedness, than the first shot.
A branch high above her intercepted the bullet, and the limb came floating slowly down, drifting like a kite. From her back, she watched it land quietly, and she continued to lie there, bleeding a little, and trembling, before finally rising and climbing over the fence, with its “Posted” signs, and continuing on after the elk.
She was surprised by how hard it was to follow his blood trail: only a damp splatter here and there, sometimes red and other times drying brown already against the yellow aspen leaves that looked like spilled coins—as if some thief had been wounded while ferrying away a strongbox and had spilled his blood upon that treasure.
She tried to focus on the task at hand but was aware also of feeling strangely and exceedingly lonely—remembering, seemingly from nowhere, that her father had been red-green colorblind, and realizing how difficult it might have been for him to see those drops of blood. Wishing again that he were here with her, though, to help her with the tracking of this animal.
It was amazing to her how little blood there was. The entry wound, she knew, was no larger than a straw, and the exit wound wouldn’t be much larger than a quarter, and even that small wound would be partially closed up with the shredded flesh, so that almost all of the blood would still be inside the animal, sloshing around, hot and poisoned now, no longer of use but unable to come out.
A drop here, a drop there. She couldn’t stop marveling at how few clues there were. It was easier to follow the tracks in the soft earth, and the swath of broken branches, than it was the blood trail—though whether she was following the herd’s path or the bull’s separate path, she couldn’t be entirely sure.
She came to the edge of the timber and looked out across a small plowed field, the earth dark from having just been turned over to autumn stubble. Her elk was collapsed dead out in the middle of it—the rest of the herd
was long gone, nowhere to be seen—and there was a truck parked next to the elk already, and standing next to the elk were two older men in cowboy hats. Jyl was surprised, then, at how tall the antlers were—taller than either man, even with the elk lying stretched out on the bare ground; taller even than the cab of the truck.
The men did not appear happy to see her coming. It seemed to take her a long time to reach them, and it was hard walking over the furrows and clods of stubble, and from the looks on the men’s faces, she was afraid that the elk might have been one of their pets, that they might even have given it a name.
It wasn’t that bad, as it turned out, but it still wasn’t good. Their features softened a little as she closed the final distance and they saw how young she was, and how frightened
— she could have been either man’s daughter—and as she approached there seemed to be some force of energy about her that disposed them to think the best of her; they found it hard to believe, too, that had she killed the elk illegally she would be marching right up to claim it.
There were no handshakes, no introductions. There was still frost on the windshield of the men’s truck, and Jyl realized they must have jumped into their truck and cold-started it, racing straight up to where they knew the herd hung out. Used to hang out.
Plumes of fog-breath leapt from the first man’s mouth as he spoke, even though they were all three standing in the sunlight.
“You shot it over on the other side of the fence, right, over on the national forest, and it leapt the fence and came over here to die?” he asked, and he was not being sarcastic: as if, now that he could see Jyl’s features, and her fear and youth, he could not bear to think of her as a poacher.