The Lives of Rocks

by Rick Bass

  Remembering these things, a grown woman now woven of losses and gains, Jyl sometimes looks down at her body and considers the mix of things: the elk becoming her, as she ate it, and becoming Ralph and Bruce, as they ate it (did this make them somehow, distantly, like brothers and sister, or uncles and niece, if not fathers and daughter?)—and the two old men becoming the soil then, in their burial, as had her father, becoming as still and silent as stone, except for the worms that writhed now in their chests, and her own tenuous memories of them. And her own gone-away father, worm food, elk food, now: but how he had loved it.

  Mountains in her heart now, and antlers, and mountain lions and sunrises and huge forests of pine and spruce and tamarack, and elk, all uncontrollable. She likes to think now that each day she moves farther away from him, she is also moving closer to him.

  As if within her, beneath the span of her own days, there are other hunts going on continuously, giant elk in flight from the pursuit of hunters other than herself, and the birth of other mountains being plotted and planned—other mountains rising, then, and still more mountains vanishing into distant seas—and that even more improbable than her encountering that one giant elk, on her first hunt, was the path, the wandering line, that brought her to her father in the first place, that delivered her to him and had made him hers and she his—the improbability and yet the certainty that would place the two of them in each other’s lives, tiny against the backdrop of the world and tinier still against the mountains of time.

  But belonging to each other, as much in death as in life. Inescapably, and forever. The hunt showing her that.

  Yazoo

  The first time I realized that Wejumpka was strong, really strong, was when I slept in late. It was a rainy morning in November, late in the morning—noon. Vern and I had been up drinking, talking, playing records, until well past three-thirty in the morning. The doctors had said that Vern could go any month now, any week, even; that when his liver shut down everything bad was going to start happening, real fast. That was just the way it was, though, and you couldn’t change a man’s whole life.

  “It’s like trying to make a pine tree turn into an oak,” Vern said about his not being able to stop drinking. We weren’t drinking anything hard: just beer, to remind us of when we were young, and because there’d been a sale on it that day at the gas station.

  Vern’s most recent girlfriend, a girl my age, a girl I’d gone to high school with, had left him two days ago, saying she o didn’t want to be around when he died; but Vern finally understood that he was indeed going to die, that it was coming, no maybes about it, and he had decided that there was a sort of dignity in not changing his movements, his patterns, before it happened. He didn’t want to feel like he was running from it, since it was going to happen, and though I had not agreed with his logic at first, I saw what he was talking about the closer we got to it. Or I thought I did. He said that he did not miss the girl much one way or the other, if that was how she was, and I saw what he meant by that, too.

  It was almost as if it was all happening to me instead of to him; I could see all of it, could see why he was doing things. It was what anyone would have done.

  We kept the beers iced down in a trash can, floated them in water and ice, and they were so cold that they made our teeth hurt. Sometimes Vern would cry out in pain when he got up to go to the restroom. It was a bad thing he had done to himself, all that drinking, but it was done and there wasn’t any going back.

  “It’s like a ski run,” I said, “coming down a long run, near the bottom, where you haven’t fallen yet. You can try jumps, loops, flips, anything. You’re hot, you’re on a roll, you can do anything.”

  “I’ve never been skiing before,” Vern said. He looked down at his beer. He was fifty, but looked sixty-five. His face was loose on him, and his eyes were sad and red, and his hair had gone all to hell, shot through with gray where it wasn’t falling out; but he still had Wejumpka, his youngest, and always would. Instead of talking about dying, we talked about Wejumpka whenever the subject of Vern’s health came up. I was Wejumpka’s godfather, next in line, and it scared me.

  “How’re you doing, big guy?” I’d ask, putting a hand on Vern’s shoulder. I’m thirty, but feel older.

  And Vern would grin, glad I was gripping his shoulder, and he’d look down and say something like, “That Wejumpka, he’s something else.”

  Wejumpka was twelve. Vern had another son, Austin, who was eighteen by then, but Austin was different. Austin had run away from home when he was sixteen to Arizona to live on an Indian reservation and take peyote; Austin drank like a fish, had a marijuana plant growing in the backyard of his mother’s house, sassed his mother, wore earrings, and was, we suspected, asexual.

  But Wejumpka! My godson built model planes, wrote his thank-you notes, hugged everyone he met, and sometimes sat on the back porch with his dog, a big golden retriever named Ossie, and played the harmonica. He was learning to play it well.

  It’s a quiet neighborhood, full of old trees, Spanish moss, everything moving slow. The houses were two and three stories, with their foundations thrown down in what was then forest, built on the treacherous, shifting Yazoo clay formation: slick and red, deceitful, it was beginning to crawl back toward the swamp, toward the Pearl River, trying to take the houses with it.

  A lot of the homes were for sale. There were small panics at the first crack in the driveway, the crack that grew after a rainstorm or a cold spell, sometimes growing so fast that you thought you could see it happening.

  Vern wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near Ann. The judge had barred him from coming within a five-mile radius of her; he’d given Vern a map of the city of Jackson, showing where he could and could not go. It was simply too much for the city to bear, otherwise. Vern and Ann went at it like cats and dogs, hissing and spitting whenever they came across each other, throwing canned goods at each other, turning one another’s shopping carts over in the grocery store. Vern had sometimes shopped with the red-haired girl who was now gone, which had infuriated Ann to new levels of berserkness—she was a big woman, getting bigger since the divorce, and she’d take her Mace sprayer out of her purse and chase Vern through the grocery store with it, spraying him as if he were a bad dog—and it was just too much for the city to stand.

  But I wasn’t barred from being in the neighborhood, and because so many of the shifting homes were up for sale, some of them were also available for lease and for rent: for anything. Most people just wanted out, any way they could do it. Quitting was imminent.

  To help Vern out and to keep an eye on his boy, and on old Ann, I rented the house across the street; put curtains up, wore a false beard and mustache and wig, walked with a limp and a cane, so she would not know it was me.

  I can’t really stress enough how brutal the divorce was. It took everything they both had, and then from Vern it took a little more.

  Ann got his new unlisted phone number and passed it out to her friends. They would call him at all hours of the night—and always he had to answer, not knowing if it was an emergency involving one of the boys or merely another hate call—but always it was the latter.

  “You’re a dead man, Davidson,” a woman’s husky voice would whisper, full of hate: maniacal, and full of the holiness of being right. “Dead meat” the voice would hiss, and then hang up. And Vern would laugh about it, telling it to me, but he had also half worried about it for a long time—and months later, when the calls finally stopped coming, he had begun to worry even more, as if now they didn’t dare risk threatening him, because they were serious now and didn’t want him to be alert.

  He listened to noises in the night for a long time, he said, and wondered how they would do it to him. He couldn’t understand such hatred; he would shake his head, run his hand through his hair, and say, “I just don’t get it. It was only a divorce.”

  I wanted to tell him that it was not just a divorce, that it was all these lives, that they were ticking away, lost
time, misspent hours, and things ruined, good things—but that was precisely what Ann’s angry friends were telling him, and I was Vern’s pal so I could not do that. I had to try to bolster him, even if with stories, tales and lies, until he was back on his feet again, or until the end. It was a hard job.

  If Vern was out, Ann’s friends would leave messages on his answering machine. They called from pay phones, and when they got the answering machine, they would tell him to check with Sue at the hospital, that there’d been an accident involving one of the boys.

  He had been wrong, but they were more wrong. They were guerrilla tactics, brutal and nasty, and I did not blame Vern for wanting to get out early. I opened his beers for him, handed them to him, got the whiskey for him out of the freezer. I’d always heard that a weak man can stand any kind of pain except another’s. I didn’t know if I was being weak. It was the only thing I knew to do. Reason had long ago left Ann and would never return; and Vern’s strength, and courage, had finally been worn down.

  There was only my godchild, Wejumpka, left.

  We drove into the garage after dark, wearing dark clothes, sometimes already drunk, and pulled the garage door down and made sure all the curtains were drawn before turning on any lights inside. We always kept one man at the window upstairs in a room with the lights turned off, to keep an eye on his house. It was usually Vern up there.

  I’d be down in the kitchen fixing supper, or fixing drinks, and he’d be sitting backwards on a chair, resting over it like a riverboat captain, watching his old house with expensive field glasses, the kind hunters use right at dusk for drawing in as much of the failing light as possible—and he’d call out in a loud voice what all was going on, a radio announcer giving the play-by-play.

  If Ann was in the kitchen he could see her, and he’d call out what she was cooking, what she was nibbling on—“She’s feeding her fat face with croutons” he’d howl; “She’s just eating the croutons out of the box with her paw, like a primate!” he’d roar, sometimes falling backwards, and I’d have to rush up to see if he was all right, to clean up the beer he’d spilled and to hand him another—but other times he would fall silent, and downstairs, hearing the silence, I’d know that he must have the binoculars trained on the boys, if Austin was home: that perhaps they were lying on the rug in the den in front of the television, or maybe simply even doing their homework.

  One time I brought drinks upstairs, Long Island iced teas in tall glasses, with another gallon of reserves in a pitcher, and some nachos, only to find him weeping, still watching the house across the street through the field glasses, but with tears rolling down his cheeks and shoulders shaking.

  The curtains were open across the street, and in the yellow square of light in Ann’s living room we could see Austin trying to teach Wejumpka how to dance to some song we could not hear.

  We could only watch, as if they were an old silent film, while Austin, with his raggedy blue-jean jacket and old Le-vis, his long woman’s hair and earrings, shut his eyes and boogied madly, running in place, it seemed, throwing his arms up in the air and shaking them in a free, mad glee, and then stopping, suddenly, standing behind Wejumpka, lifting Wejumpka’s arms, trying to show Wejumpka how it was done, growing exasperated, then, when Wejumpka did not get the hang of it. Austin stepped in front of Wejumpka once more and began dancing again, writhing and jumping, leaping, doubtless to one of Vern’s old records that Ann had confiscated. All the old good ones were in there. It was probably Bob Seger, I thought, but said nothing, and pulled the shades so Vern wouldn’t have to watch any longer.

  We noticed that Ann was having to turn sideways to get through doorways. She was Vern’s and my height, five foot eight or so, and had been a pretty plump 160 pounds at the wedding, and 185 soon thereafter; during the months preceding the divorce, Vern said, she had weighed in at around 240, and now, almost three years later, she had to be tipping them at close to 300 and was showing no signs of slowing down.

  “Would you have loved her if she were not fat?” I asked Vern. He leaned back and roared with laughter, shaking with it, delighted with the thought, and with the simplicity of such an idea.

  One day we watched as the carpenters came and widened all her doorways for her, so that she could fit through them more easily. I wondered if it embarrassed Wejumpka to have a mother so large; I wondered what he thought about Vern’s breath, about Vern always being drunk.

  But Wejumpka still seemed to be his usual self. It was almost as if he thought that these things did not matter, or that they were of a lesser importance—though I had no idea what, then, he thought was important. Sometimes we’d watch the house on weekends, in the broad middle of the day, though it was riskier; and we’d open the windows in the fall just to get some fresh air moving through the rented house and to listen to the street and neighborhood sounds—lawn mowers, boys raking, motor scooters, the whole fall list—and in the late afternoon we could hear Wejumpka sitting on the back porch playing his harmonica; a faint sound of which we heard only parts, while the rest of it was washed down the street along with tumbling dry leaves by the winds that moved through the neighborhood.

  “He’s blowing it like a signal,” Vern would say. There is no excusing a drunk, no reasoning with him, and he’d be certain of it, swearing up and down and crying that Wejumpka wanted to see him, that that was the reason he was out there by himself playing the harmonica, and Vern would jump up and go tearing down the stairs, pulling his jacket on, running as if to rescue Wejumpka from a burning house, running out into the purple gloom of dusk and across the street, out into the crisp night, and I’d be running behind him, trying to catch up and to keep him from harm.

  Vern’s shirttail would be out, his shoelaces untied, his jacket on inside out; he’d go tearing through the hedge toward Wejumpka, who, thank God, was always alone, always playing the harmonica by himself and sometimes even humming or singing. Had Ann seen Vern that close to the center of the demilitarized zone, that far into it, she would surely have taken the hoe to him, with no emotion whatsoever, merely striking at him as she would a weed until he was no longer there—but she never saw him, and Vern would crawl under the bushes, through the hedge, and creep toward Wejumpka, crawling to stay out of Ann’s sight, and he’d go all the way up to where Wejumpka was sitting and rest his head on Wejumpka’s knee, reach up and tousle his hair, squeeze his shoulder, and say, “Hi, pal. How’s it going?”

  I do not think that Wejumpka ever associated his harmonica playing with these appearances by Vern. I do not think he ever realized that he was summoning Vern, like a bad genie from a bottle, by blowing the wistful notes; I think he merely played the harmonica and hummed as a way of breathing, offeeling; in the evenings, when it began to grow dark and things were not quite so clear, he would go sit with his dog, and hum, and sing. He had a fine, clear voice, though his harmonica playing was still a little unsure, a little quavery.

  He was always glad to see his father, though I could tell by the way he looked back at the house that his mother had instructed him, in her fat intuitiveness, what he should do if his father ever did approach him. But then he would look back down at Vern and put his harmonica down, smiling, and would pat Vern’s mussed-up hair, smoothing it into place, patting Vern as if he were a dog, while he patted Ossie with his other hand.

  They’d sit there like that, with night coming down and stars coming up through the trees, until I could stand the tension no longer; and I’d come out of the bushes and help Vern sit up, and tell Wejumpka that we had to go now, and, strangely, Vern always let me take him, never put up a struggle. It was not that he feared Ann, I think, but more that he was simply relaxed at having seen his son again, at just having touched him and talked to him for a while, petted the dog together with him and asked him how school was going, if the other kids were treating him okay, so that Vern would then do anything I told him to: he’d be tired from the drinking, but, more important, just out and out utterly relaxed, utterly happy, and I coul
d lead him away, back the way we had come, crawling into the dark hedge and then sneaking back across the street to our rented spy house.

  “You’ll remember not to bother your mother with this, right?” I’d ask my godson, and he’d nod, looking down at his feet, too soon an adult, and say, “Sure, sure.” At first he’d wanted to call me Uncle Mac, but Vern and I had gotten him to drop the Uncle, and it made him seem like even more of an adult, sometimes.

  Vern was still working, right on through his illness; there would be the insurance money afterward, but until then there was always the alimony, and some months it was such a tight squeeze, he could barely make it.

  We’d watch Ann in the evenings, sometimes eating a whole brick of cheese in front of the kitchen window, staring over the sink, gnawing at it, eating the whole slab, looking back over her shoulder to see if either of the children was coming. Or angel food cake—she’d buy them at the grocery store instead of making them, and simply bury her whole face in one, eating her way through the middle until her face appeared on the other side, looking like some sort of clown’s, and Vern would begin howling again, slapping his leg and laughing, falling out of the chair again, but I did not think it was so funny, sometimes; even from across the street, I could feel Ann’s panic, and it made me hungry, made me want to eat something, too—but instead I would get up and fix more drinks.

  I slept so late that morning in November not because of the previous night’s drinking but because it was raining and I liked the sound of it. I liked having the big rented house and the chance to help someone out, even if I was on the wrong side. It made me feel like an outlaw, a desperado, which I had never been before, and I liked it. The rain on someone else’s house, with me warm and dry inside, made me feel like a bank robber holed up in a cave somewhere.