by Rick Bass
I was just hanging back, shaky with anger. They finished their breakfast and went inside to plot, or watch VCR movies. I went over to the smokehouse and peered through the dusty windows. Blood dripped from the gleaming red hindquarters. They’d nailed the moose’s head, with the antlers, to one of the walls, so that his blue-blind eyes stared down at his own corpse. There was a baseball cap perched on his antlers and a cigar stuck between his big lips.
I went up into the woods to cool off, but I knew I’d go back. I liked the job of caretaker, liked living at the edge of that meadow.
That evening, the three of us were out on the porch watching the end of the day come in. The days were getting shorter. Quentin and Zim were still pretending that none of the previous night’s savagery had happened. It occurred to me that if they thought I had the power to stop them, they would have put my head in that smokehouse a long time ago.
Quentin, looking especially burned out, was slouched down in his chair. He had his back to the wall, bottle of rum in hand, and was gazing at the meadow, where his lake and his cabins with lights burning in each of them would someday sit. I was only hanging around to see what was what and to try to slow them down—to talk about those hard winters whenever I got the chance, and mention how unfriendly the people in the valley were. Which was true, but it was hard to convince Quentin of this, because every time he showed up, they got friendly.
“I’d like that a lot,” Quentin said, his speech slurred. Earlier in the day I’d seen a coyote, or possibly a wolf, trot across the meadow alone, but I didn’t point it out to anyone. Now, perched in the shadows on a falling-down fence, I saw the great gray owl, watching us, and I didn’t point him out either. He’d come gliding in like a plane, ghostly gray, with his four-foot wingspan. I didn’t know how they’d missed him. I hadn’t seen the owl in a couple of weeks, and I’d been worried, but now I was uneasy that he was back, knowing that it would be nothing for a man like Zim to walk up to that owl with his cowboy pistol and put a bullet, point blank, into the bird’s ear—the bird with his eyes set in his face, looking straight at you the way all predators do.
“I’d like that so much,” Quentin said again—meaning Zim’s idea of the lodge as a winter resort. He was wearing a gold chain around his neck with a little gold pistol dangling from it. He’d have to get rid of that necklace if he moved out here. It looked like something he might have gotten from a Cracker Jack box, but was doubtless real gold.
“It may sound corny,” Quentin said, “but if I owned this valley, I’d let people from New York, from California, from wherever, come out here for Christmas and New Year’s. I’d put a big sixty-foot Christmas tree in the middle of the road up by the Mercantile and the saloon, and string it with lights, and we’d all ride up there in a sleigh, Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve, and we’d sing carols, you know? It would be real small town and homey,” he said. “Maybe corny, but that’s what I’d do.”
Zim nodded. “There’s lonely people who would pay through the nose for something like that,” he said.
We watched the dusk glide in over the meadow, cooling things off, blanketing the field’s dull warmth. Mist rose from the field.
Quentin and Zim were waiting for money, and Quentin, especially, was still waiting for his nerves to calm. He’d owned the ranch for a full cycle of seasons, and still he wasn’t well.
A little something—peace?—would do him good. I could see that Christmas tree all lit up. I could feel that sense of community, of new beginnings.
I wouldn’t go to such a festivity. I’d stay back in the woods like the great gray owl. But I could see the attraction, could see Quentin’s need for peace, how he had to have a place to start anew—though soon enough, I knew, he would keep on taking his percentage from that newness. Taking too much.
Around midnight, I knew, he’d start smashing things, and I couldn’t blame him. Of course he wanted to come to the woods, too.
I didn’t know if the woods would have him.
All I could do was wait. I sat very still, like that owl, and thought about where I could go next, after this place was gone. Maybe, I thought, if I sit very still, they will just go away.
In the Loyal Mountains
MY GIRLFRIEND AND I drove my uncle around the Texas hill country during what was to be the last year of his life. We did not know then that they were his last days—though he did, I think—and we always had a good time. I’m married now, and this girl we drove around with, Spanda, is not my wife, and I was never fooled into believing that one day she might be. All this happened a long time ago; I have been saying it’s been ten years for so long that by now it is truthfully more like twenty.
Uncle Zorey was single and had never been married, never had children. It’s possible that he spoiled me. Zorey owned a machine shop, and custom manufactured large cranes and bulldozers, and he always had money, unbelievable amounts of it. My father and mother used to laugh about it, because he never seemed to know how to spend it. My father was a professional golfer of sorts. He was thirty-eight years old then, and still trying to make it on the big circuit, the tournament circuit, and he and my mother traveled a good bit. I was their only son, and I stayed with Zorey when they went on the road. My father and mother were very much in love, and loved to travel. There was not the least bit of resentment from them that Zorey was so rich, while we were not. The fact that they enjoyed his company so much was one of my favorite things about him.
I had been born with one leg a few inches shorter than the other—a cruel joke, because it threw my golf swing way off—and understandably, my father gave up on my chances of becoming a pro by the time I was seven or eight. He had the grace, perhaps given to him by sport, not to push me. He had compassion for people weaker than himself. Although my father loved golf, he was a better person than he was a golfer. But he was still a very good golfer, just not among the best, and he’d won or finished high often enough to raise me and to support my mother.
My father had, and still does have, a bad back, and I remember that my mother was always rubbing it. After a match, when my father limped home, she massaged it with a rolling pin. In school I was teased about my father—this was in Texas, back in the sixties. It was widely believed that golf was a sissy’s game, with the manicured greens, the caddies, the little electric golf carts, and the natty way of dressing. For a while I tried to convince the other kids in school that my father’s nickname was Mad Dog, but it never caught.
When he was home, my father walked around the house with a plastic jug of aspirin in the pocket of his robe, and he was always opening the jug and shaking a few out, swallowing them dry. He wouldn’t let himself take anything stronger. I would never ask him how he was feeling—I thought it might remind him of his back pain, if he had somehow managed to put it out of his mind.
I remember Uncle Zorey coming over to our house for dinner whenever my parents got back from one of their road trips. It would be a feast, a kind of reward for his watching after me. Mom would do all the cooking, but because Uncle Zorey was an outdoorsman, and because he liked wild game best, he would bring over the food: pheasants and grouse from hunting trips he’d gone on in South Dakota, and venison roasts, and fresh fish he’d caught from one of the many lakes north of Houston. My uncle was a pilot, and often flew by himself to one of these lakes, landing at a grass airstrip outside a tiny backwoods town. He’d give one of the local men a hundred dollars or so for the use of a boat and go out on the lake and catch fish. Sometimes the local man asked to go with him, but my uncle always wanted to be alone. He was a good fisherman, and a good shot. His freezer was always full of fish and game.
At dinner we talked about my school, my fathers golf game, or my uncle’s recent fishing trips. We also talked about things my mother was interested in—politics, wars, morals—and about her childhood, which she missed. My mother came from a large family, and grew up on a farm in Missouri. She loved talking about that farm and about the things her brothers and sisters used to
do—there were nine of them in all—and the trouble they used to get into. She talked about cold mornings, about doing the laundry by hand, and about what a thrill it was to get new shoes—all the old things. She was reliving her history, and we listened to her with awe.
She was the one who killed the chickens on Sundays for the big dinner after church. One of her older sisters would hold the chicken down on a tree stump, setting its neck between two nails driven into the stump, and my mother would hit the neck with the hatchet.
“One-Chop,” my mother said. “They called me One-Chop.”
We ate so much while listening to her stories. We stayed up late and ate and drank far into the night, as if trying to gain ground on some ache or loneliness that had slipped in while my parents were away. They let me drink, too; I was sixteen or seventeen by then. Zorey ate the most and drank the most. No matter how much food my mother fixed, no matter how many bottles of wine were opened, we finished everything, with Zorey leading the way. At midnight or one in the morning, we’d all be groggy and full, and stumble off to bed.
“Zorey, you were insatiable,” my father would say as he and my mother went down the hall, leaning against each other, to their bedroom. My father would look back over his shoulder and say, “Zorey, you were just an animal!” It was a joke they’d had between them for many years, a joke that began with their father. Even then, I had heard, Zorey had an enormous appetite and a brute strength; their father’s nickname for him was “Animal.”
“Good night, Jackie,” my uncle would say to me, pausing at the doorway of the guest room. “Good night all.”
I remember stumbling into my room, reeling drunk, pretending I was a gut-shot actor in a western, spinning in the dark, pretending I had caught a bullet in the stomach. Clutching it with both hands, I would do a slow triple spin, all for Hollywood, and topple to the bed, land on my back, and fall instantly asleep.
I am a plain man. What I do for a living has little to do with the way I sometimes feel about things. I’m an accountant, and a junior one at that. I’d like to be someone with power, sweeping power, the power to change things, to right wrongs—a judge, a lawyer, a surgeon—but because I am not any of these things doesn’t mean they aren’t in me.
My uncle was a crook. His death was a suicide, and it came when he felt the evidence closing in. There were questions arising from (where else?) the construction companies’ accounting departments; there were letters and queries from lawyers, polite at first. All of these things are in his dusty files, his long-ago files, which I felt the need to remove from his house after his death, and which I now keep in my attic. It must have been a very tough time for him near the end, with no way out. I wish that he’d never been found out, that he could have gone on forever. There was no fishing in prison, is what must have been on his mind, no woods in which to hunt, no grass airstrips to float down onto on hot June weekday afternoons.
What could he have been thinking? It is not right for me to try to guess. But it is fair for me to remember.
My mother might have thought it was a burden for my uncle to keep me while they were on the road. I don’t think she ever realized what fun we had—my uncle and I, and then, once I hooked up with her, Spanda.
Spanda came from the wrong side of the tracks—although in Houston, at that time, there really were no tracks, literally or figuratively. She did not attend my school, and she sometimes didn’t even attend her own. Spanda was not a nice girl. I thought she was lovely—and she was lovely—but she was a little rough, a little mean, and she did not have many odds in her favor except to be rough and mean.
My leg excited her, the shorter one. It’s not proper or relevant to go into how much it excited her; it was her business and mine. But it did—she loved the leg—and though she did not love me, it was the first rime I had ever felt such a thing, someone attracted to my leg, and to me, and it gave me a confidence I needed badly. It didn’t hurt, either, that Uncle Zorey was almost always around, his pockets bulging with dollars, like a caricature of an old-style Texan, the kind people used to love until they learned to make fun of him—generous, big-hearted, with loose money spilling from him like water. Uncle Zorey liked Spanda too, and he saw to it that she always got what she wanted when she was with me, saw to it that she was always happy.
We were both seventeen. This was clover for me. I believed in things rather than understanding them. What we are talking about here is innocence, no different from anyone else’s.
Uncle Zorey was as wild as a big kid when he was away from my parents and away from his office. When I got in from school, those times I stayed at his house—which was many times that year, because my parents were traveling all the time—my uncle would change out of his suit and into a pair of old coveralls, go out to the driving range, and hit golf balls.
The driving range would be nearly empty on those afternoons, and my uncle and I were able to practice our swings in peace. There might be a woman or two—matronly, yellow-haired women, overweight, dressed in tight bermudas, with meat-eating spikes on their shoes, to better grip the earth for the long drives that seemed to give them so much pleasure. I was used to their looks—looks of pity, and what they thought was knowledge—and it was easy to ignore them.
Even hitting one-legged, as it were, even hitting off balance, I had my uncle’s great, strange strength. After several weeks of practice, I was hitting the ball farther than we could have hoped for. But I could not hit it straight. With my twisting swing, I sent the ball into a wild, sail-away slice, or almost as bad, into a horrid, rocketing hook.
My uncle would sit on a soda crate, sweating, toweling his face with a handkerchief and drinking beers, which he kept in a little ice chest by his side. I would swing harder and harder, but along with my uncle’s strength, I had my father’s back. At times it hurt so much I wanted to tell my uncle that I didn’t want to play golf anymore. But then I’d see his look of childlike expectation as he sat there on the wooden box and studied my swing, and so I took my best cut, and away the ball would soar. Sometimes I got so frustrated that I would shout as loudly as I could—at the frustration, and also at the cramps in my back—and the lady golfers would move away from us, pack up their clubs and leave. My uncle liked the shouts, and he would nod, take a sip of beer, and lean forward and hand me another bucket of golf balls.
My father was having a very good spring. He won one big local tournament, and for the first time in several years was selected to play in a prestigious tournament overseas. He was getting offers again to do endorsements, but he wisely rejected them and concentrated on his golf, and did even better.
He was often written about in the sports pages of the papers, and I was proud of him, but also felt a little guilty from all the days in school at a younger age when I tried to change his name and wished he’d competed in a sport more violent, more bloodthirsty than golf. The newspapers were always saying what a gentleman he was, what a good sport, and how he brought class to the game, class to the city.
I began to eat aspirin the way he did. My uncle never saw me doing it, but I started not long after my father won his tournament. My uncle and I stopped golfing around this time, and I felt a flood of relief. Though I may be attributing too much scheming to Zorey, I wonder now if he knew all along what he’d been doing—filling me with all that golf—eliminating all doubt, all question of what was and wasn’t possible. I was delighted never to have to pick up a golf club again, delighted never to have to watch the game being played again.
Uncle Zorey brought Spanda home from work with him one day later that spring, saying simply that her father worked in his plant and that she was new in town, and didn’t know anyone. She wanted to meet someone her own age, and so my uncle had volunteered me for the job. He hoped I didn’t mind.
Lies! Many children are wise at the age of seventeen, but I was not one of them. I believed my uncle, as did so many other people. Spanda looked like an Indian, with dark eyes and long black hair. Often she wore faded b
lue jeans and a purple tie-dyed shirt. She never put on makeup. We got along famously from the start. It doesn’t matter what I think now—wondering whether we would have gotten along so well were it not for my leg, and more importantly, for my uncle, and his money.
We played cards and listened to the radio; we went for drives with my uncle, who took us along in his truck. At night Spanda came to my room downstairs and slipped into bed with me. My uncle slept upstairs, and slept heavily. He got up only after I had left for school.
Spanda was angry at a lot of things. She had a wonderful vocabulary of curse words, which she used against any and all incarnations of the establishment: traffic lights, policemen, rainy weather. But she was never angry at me or my uncle. I felt like a hero. And I think that upstairs in his bed, as he drifted into sleep, perhaps imagining things, I think that my uncle, too, probably felt like a hero—as well he should have, as well he should have.
Into the hill country we’d drive, once summer came. The rough, rocky country there was in no way like the rest of Texas, certainly not like the gentle, windy gulf coast where we lived. We stayed in hotels in the German tourist towns—Fredericksburg, Boerne, New Braunfels—getting separate rooms, one for Spanda and me and one for my uncle. We stopped at beer gardens and sat outside in the shade, drinking cold beer and eating huge amounts of food, my uncle usually ordering one of everything on the menu. We would walk up and down the wide streets of the little towns, window-shopping in the dazzling heat, with hardly anyone else out, the heat far too great, and buy whatever Spanda desired, whatever my uncle saw and wanted: an old sewing machine or a rocking chair in the window of an antiques store, fresh-baked loaves of bread, a gingham dress for Spanda, a walking stick for me. Then we would put more beer in the ice chest in the back of the truck and head for the wild country. We drove up twisting white caliche roads into mountains of cedar and rock and cactus, the heat rising in shimmers and mirages, then sailed down into the small valleys between the hills, rattling across creek bottoms and high-water caution dips, through water-seeking live oaks. We barreled along, my uncle with a beer in his hand, one foot mashed on the accelerator and the other foot propped up and hanging out the window. Spanda and I would drink beers too. She sat in my lap with her arms around me, her hair swirling, her eyes fuzzy and distant, looking out at the countryside.