The Lives of Rocks

by Rick Bass

  Everyone participated. Class distinctions fell away, and Otto and my mother and father and I loaded our pillowcases right alongside the rich and the superrich, as well as alongside the hotel workers, filling our pillowcases with our catches: crabs, catfish, red snapper, flounder, shrimp, bullfrogs, sheepshead, angelfish... We didn’t have to worry about sharks, because they wouldn’t come in to where the fresh water was mixing. It was all ours. For that one night—or those few hours—it was all ours. Father and Mother were very happy, as were all of the people out on the beach, and it felt to me as if I had been drawn already into some other, older world—the land of adults—without having quite yet petitioned for or having even desired such entrance, still pleased as I was by childhood.

  In remembering the jubilee, I recall how different the quality of sound was. It wasn’t extraordinarily loud; it was just different, a combination of sounds I had never heard before. The waves were shushing and the confused fish were slapping the water as they thrashed and fought the poison of the fresh water. There were a lot of birds overhead, gulls mostly, squalling and squealing, and the ten-piece band from the restaurant had come down and set up along the water’s edge, and they were playing.

  The hotel staff had set up dining tables with linen tablecloths out on the beach, and they had lit torches and candles all along the shore, and around the dining tables. The chefs had come down to the jubilee also, and the chefs were chopping off fish heads and gutting the entrails, slicing off filets and frying and boiling and grilling a dozen different recipes at once, luminous in their bright white aprons, knives flashing in the candlelight. There were cats everywhere, cats coming from out of the sea oats to take those fish heads and run back off into the bushes with them.

  There was a boy walking up and down the beach, staying almost always just at the farthest edge of the light from the candles and lanterns and bonfires. He was barefoot, like all of us, and shirtless, and was wearing blue jeans that had been cut off at the knees; and as he paced back and forth, observing us, I could tell that he was agitated. His agitation stood out even more, surrounded as he was by the almost somnolent contentedness of everyone else. The rest of us sloshed around in the waves, our heads tipped slightly downward like wading birds’, with all the fish in the world available to us, it seemed, just for the taking.

  The boy was roughly my age, and because he was hanging back at the edge of firelight, back in the blue-silver light of the moon, that is how I thought of him, as the blue boy. I hadn’t seen him around earlier in the week, and I had the feeling that rather than a hotel guest he was some feral wayfarer who had wandered down our way from a distant, ragged shack back in the palmetto bushes.

  He looked hungry, too—like those cats that kept dragging away the fish heads—and though I couldn’t hear any voices over the little lapping sounds of the surf, I got the impression that he would sometimes call out to us, asking for something, and I avoided observing him too closely, out of concern that he might somehow seek me out.

  Once the chefs had most of the fish prepared, they began ringing a series of large copper bells mounted on heavy wrought-iron stands and tripods, and as that gonging carillon rolled out across the waves, most of us turned and waded back to shore, to seat ourselves at the long dining tables set up in the sand; though still a few people remained out in the water. Some of them had borrowed tools from the gardener’s shed and were raking in the fish, or shoveling them into baskets—unwilling to stop, even when the feast was ready and waiting, and set before them.

  We ate and ate. The chefs mixed champagne and orange juice in pitchers for us at sunrise and blew out the torches. We could see the fish out in the ocean starting to recover when the sun came up. The surface of the water was thrashing again as fish spun and flopped and rolled back over, right side up.

  The blue boy had disappeared when the thirty or so of us had turned and come marching back in from out of the waves; but now he reappeared, came out into the soft gray light of dawn, and I could see that my initial impression had been correct, that he was scraggly and feral, as rough as a cob; and that indeed he was agitated, for now he waded out into the waves and began scolding the dozen or so guests who were still out there with pitchforks and shovels and bushel-baskets and trash cans, still raking in those stressed and wounded and compromised fish. He was hollering at them also to leave the biggest, healthiest fish, and was shouting at them to come on in, that they had taken enough, had taken more than enough.

  With the boy’s attention focused elsewhere, I was free to observe him without being noticed, and there was something about him that made me think that he was not from this country—though what other country he might have been from, I could not have said. A country, I supposed, where they had run out of fish.

  The pitchforkers ignored the blue boy, however, and kept on reaching for more and more fish, stabbing and spearing them, scooping and netting them into their baskets, until finally all the fish were gone and the sun was bright in the sky: and the blue boy just stood there, staring at them, nearly chest deep in the waves, and then he turned and made his way back to shore, and disappeared into the dunes.

  The sun rose orange over the water, and the ocean turned foggy gray, the same color as the sky. The band stopped playing, the waiters and waitresses cleared the tables, and we all went back to our rooms to sleep.

  For two days afterward we would see all these rich people who’d come to this place for a vacation working on their fish instead. They kept them cool in garbage cans filled with ice, and would be scaling and filleting fish all day long: these bankers and lawyers and doctors and titans. Some of them used electric knives, and we’d hear that buzzing, humming sound, a sawing, going on all day.

  They were slipping with the knives and chopping up their hands, so that at dinner the next couple of nights we would see people trying to eat with their hands wrapped in gauze bandages, with blood splotches soaking through them.

  The rich people would have fish scales all over them, too—not a lot, just one or two: stuck to a thumbnail or sometimes a cheekbone, or in their hair—and they wouldn’t realize it, so that the scales would be glittering as they ate. It made them look special, as if they were wearing some new kind of jewelry, or as if they were on their way to a party or had just come from one.

  We ate fish for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. They were far and away the best fish I’ve ever eaten. The clerk in the lobby said she’d actually been disappointed by the yield—that it was one of the briefest and smallest jubilees she’d witnessed yet—and when I asked about the blue boy who’d been so upset, she said that he lived just a mile or so up the beach and that he was always there during a jubilee, and that in years past his father and grandfather had been there also, shouting the same things.

  She said his was a fishing family, and that his warnings were not to be taken seriously, that they probably just wanted all the fish for themselves. Still, she admitted, the jubilees were getting smaller by the year, and less and less frequent. She said the blue boy came from a large family; she guessed that he had at least a dozen brothers and sisters, and that they were all churchgoers, fundamentalists, and very close, like some kind of old-fashioned feudal clan. She said that if you crossed one of them, you brought down the wrath of all of them, and that it was best to steer clear of them. She said they were all alike, that there wasn’t a hair’s breadth of difference between any of them.

  For the next couple of days Otto and I got up early and went back down to the beach just before daylight, to see if by some freak chance the jubilee might be happening again, if even on a lesser scale—like a shadow of the jubilee. We went down to the beach and waded out into the ocean. The water was dark, and the sky was dark—once or twice a mullet skipped across the surface—but that was it. Things were back to the way they had been before, big and empty.

  It was almost kind of restful, standing there in the ocean without all the noise and excitement. Or it was for me, anyway. How was I to know then that Otto
, standing right next to me, was looking at the same ocean in an entirely different way? That he wanted another jubilee right away, and then another, and another.

  “That fucking boy,” he said, speaking of the blue boy. “We weren’t hurting anything. The ocean is filled with fish, overflowing with fish,” Otto said. “The whole world could eat that many fish every day, and the new fish being born into the ocean each day would be filling their places faster than we could eat them. We could drag one giant net from here to China, and by the time we had crossed the ocean the waters behind us would have filled back in with fish, so that we could turn around and go back in the other direction, filling our nets again and again.”

  I saw that it was important for him to believe this, so I said nothing. But there was nothing in the ocean that day, and neither, I am told, was there ever another jubilee at Point Clear. We were witnesses to the last one. We were participants in the last one. I do not think we were to blame for its being the last one, and neither do I think that if people had listened to the blue boy things would have turned out differently. I think there are too many other factors, but I also think there was too much gluttony, and not enough humility.

  I can understand the nature of gluttony. I think it is the nature of the terrible truth these days—that there is not quite enough of almost everything, or anything. Or maybe one thing—one gentle, unconnected thing—though what that thing might be, or rather, the specificity of it, I could not say.

  We left for home on the third day following the jubilee. We wrapped all our leftover fish in plastic bags and newspapers and put them in boxes with ice in the trunk and drove through the night to stay out of the day’s heat. The ice kept melting, so fish-water was trickling out the back the whole way home. Every time we stopped for gas, we’d buy new bags of ice. But we got the fish home, and into the deep freeze. They lasted for about a year.

  Otto has been living in New York City for more than thirty years now. I still live in Texas, along the Gulf Coast, and miss him, and it has been a long time now since we’ve been out in the woods, or the ocean, together. Our parents eventually died, without seeing another jubilee, though we went back to that same vacation spot again and again for many years afterward. All that remains of the jubilee is my own and a few others’ dimming memories of it.

  When I remember the jubilee, and those days of childhood, what I think about now is not so much the fish made so easily available to us, or the music of the big band, or the candlelight feast, but rather the way all of us converged on one place, one time, with one goal, even if that goal was to serve ourselves, rather than others.

  Even if we were ferocious in our consumption, we were connected, that night, and those next few days. We were like a larger family, and there was bounty in the world, and the security of bounty, and no divisiveness or hierarchies, only the gift of bounty, all the bounty that the land and the sea could deliver to us, and with us never even having to ask or work for it.

  It was like childhood. Nothing, and no one, had yet been separated from anything else—not for any reason. I am glad that I saw it, and though this in itself might seem a childlike wish, I find myself imagining some days that we might all yet see it again.

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  About the Author

  RICK BASS’s fiction has received O. Henry Awards, numerous Pushcart Prizes, awards from the Texas Institute of Letters, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. Most recently, his memoir Why I Came West was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award.