by Rick Bass
Her friend slapped at a mosquito.
“Here,” said Buzbee, handing them some berries. “Eat these.”
But they made faces and spat them out when they tasted the bitterness.
Buzbee frowned. “You’ll get sick if you don’t eat them,” he said. “You won’t make it otherwise.”
They walked past him, over to the alligators, and reached out to the horned, hard skin, and touched them fearfully, ready to run, making sure the alligators were truly harmless.
“Don’t you ever, you know, get lonely for girls?” Hollingsworth asked, like a child. It was only four days later: but Jesse was back for another half-Coke. The other bikers had ridden past almost an hour earlier: a fast rip-rip-rip, and then, much later, Jesse had come up the hill, pedaling hard, but moving slower.
He was trying, but he couldn’t stay up with them. He had thrown his bike down angrily, and glowered at Hollingsworth, when he stalked up to the Coke machine, scowled at him as if it was Hollingsworth’s fault.
“I got a whore,” Jesse said, looking behind him and out across the road. The pasture was green and wet, and fog, like mist, hung over it, steaming from a rain earlier in the day. Jesse was lying; he didn’t have anyone, hadn’t had anyone in over a year—everybody knew he was slow in his group, and they shunned him for that—and Jesse felt as if he was getting farther and farther away from ever wanting anyone, or anything. He felt like everything was a blur: such was the speed at which he imagined he was trying to travel. Beyond the fog in the pasture were the trees, clear and dark and washed from the rain, and smelling good, even at this distance. Hollingsworth wished he had a whore. He wondered if Jesse would let him use his. He wondered if maybe she would be available if Jesse was to get fast and go off to the Olympics, or something.
“What does she cost?” Hollingsworth asked timidly.
Jesse looked at him in disgust. “I didn’t mean it that way,” he said. He looked tired, as if he was holding back, just a few seconds, from having to go back out on the road. Hollingsworth leaned closer, eagerly, sensing weakness, tasting hesitation. His senses were sharp from deprivation: he could tell, even before Jesse could, that Jesse was feeling thick, laggard, dulled. He knew Jesse was going to quit. He knew it the way a farmer might see that rain was coming.
“I mean,” sighed Jesse, “that I got an old lady. A woman friend. A girl.”
“What’s her name?” Hollingsworth said quickly. He would make Jesse so tired that he would never ride again. They would sit around on the porch and talk forever, all of the days.
“Jemima.”
Hollingsworth wanted her, just for her name.
“That’s nice,” he said, in a smaller voice.
It seemed to Hollingsworth that Jesse was getting his energy back. But he had felt the tiredness, and maybe, Hollingsworth hoped, it would come back.
“I found out the old man is your father,” said Jesse. He was looking out at the road. He still wasn’t making any move toward it. Hollingsworth realized, as if he had been tricked, that perhaps Jesse was just waiting for the roads to dry up a little, to finish steaming.
“Yes,” said Hollingsworth, “he has run away.”
They looked at the fields together.
“He is not right,” Hollingsworth said.
“The black women in town, the ones that do everyone’s wash at the laundromat, say he is living down in the old yellow-fever community,” Jesse said. “They say he means to stay, and that some of them have thought about going down there with him: the ones with bad husbands and too much work. He’s been sneaking around the laundry late in the evenings, and promising them he’ll cook for them, if any of them want to move down there with him. He says there aren’t any snakes. They’re scared the fever will come back, but he promises there aren’t any snakes, that he killed them all, and a lot of them are considering it.” Jesse related all this in a monotone, still watching the road, as if waiting for energy. The sun was burning the steam off. Hollingsworth felt damp, weak, unsteady, as if his mind was sweating with condensation from the knowledge, the way glasses suddenly fog up when you are walking into a humid setting.
“Sounds like he’s getting lonely,” Jesse said.
The steam was almost gone.
“He’ll freeze this winter,” Hollingsworth said, hopefully.
Jesse shook his head. “Sounds like he’s got a plan. I suspect he’ll have those women cutting firewood for him; fanning him with leaves; fishing, running traps, bearing children. Washing clothes.”
“We’ll catch him,” Hollingsworth said, making a fist and smacking it in his palm. “And anyway, those women won’t go down into those woods. Those woods are dark, and the yellow fever’s still down there: I’ll go into town, and tell them it is. I’ll tell them Buzbee’s spitting up black blood and shivering, and is crazy. Those women won’t go down into those woods.”
Jesse shook his head. He put the bottle into the rack. The road was dry; it looked clean, scrubbed, by the quick thunderstorm. “A lot of those women have got bruises on their arms, their faces, have got teeth missing, and their lives are too hard and without hope,” Jesse said slowly, as if just for the first time seeing it. “Myself, I think they’ll go down there in great numbers. I don’t think yellow fever means anything compared to what they have, or will have.” He turned to Hollingsworth and slipped a leg over his bike, got on, put his feet in the clips, steadied himself against the porch railing. “I bet by June next year you’re going to have about twenty half brothers and half sisters.”
When Jesse rode off, thickly, as if the simple heat of the air were a thing holding him back, there was no question, Hollingsworth realized, Jesse was exhausted, and fall was coming. Jesse was getting tired. He, Hollingsworth, and Buzbee, and the colored women at the washhouse, and other people would get tired, too. The temperatures would be getting cooler, milder, in a month or so, and the bikers would be riding harder than ever. There would be the smoke from fires, hunters down on the river, and at night the stars would be brighter, and people’s sleep would be heavier, and deeper. Hollingsworth wondered just how fast those bikers wanted to go. Surely, he thought, they were already going fast enough. He didn’t understand them. Surely, he thought, they didn’t know what they were doing.
The speeds that the end of June and the beginning of July brought, Jesse had never felt before, and he didn’t trust them to last, didn’t know if they could: and he tried to stay with the other riders, but didn’t know if there was anything he could do to make the little speed he had last, in the curves, and that feeling, pounding up the hills; his heart working strong and smooth, like the wildest, easiest, most volatile thing ever invented. He tried to stay with them.
Hollingsworth, the old faggot, was running out into the road some days, trying to flag him down, for some piece of bullshit, but there wasn’t time, and he rode past, not even looking at him, only staring straight ahead.
The doves started to fly. The year was moving along. A newspaper reporter wandered down, to do a short piece on the still-missing Buzbee. It was rumored he was living in an abandoned, rotting shack, deep into the darkest, lowest heart of the swamp. It was said that he had started taking old colored women, maids and such, women from the laundromat, away from town; that they were going back down into the woods with him and living there, and that he had them in a corral, like a herd of wild horses. The reporter’s story slipped farther from the truth. It was all very mysterious, all rumor, and the reward was increased to $1,200 by Hollingsworth, as the days grew shorter after the solstice, and lonelier.
Jesse stopped racing. He just didn’t go out one day; and when the Frenchmen came by for him, he pretended not to be in. He slept late and began to eat vast quantities of oatmeal. Sometimes, around noon, he would stop eating and get on his bike and ride slowly up the road to Hollingsworth’s—sometimes the other bikers would pass him, moving as ever at great speed, all of them, and they would jeer at him, shout yah-yah, and then they were quickly gone;
and he willed them to wreck, shut his eyes and tried to make it happen—picturing the whole pack of them getting tangled up, falling over one another, the way they tended to do, riding so close together.
The next week he allowed himself a whole Coca-Cola, with Hollingsworth, on the steps of the store’s porch. The old man swooned, and had to steady himself against the porch railing when he saw it was his true love. It was a dry summer. They talked more about Buzbee.
“He’s probably averse to being captured,” Hollingsworth said. “He probably won’t go easy.”
Jesse looked at his shoes, watched them, as if thinking about where they were made.
“If you were to help me catch him, I would give you my half of it,” Hollingsworth said generously. Jesse watched his shoes.
Hollingsworth got up and went in the store, and came back out with a hank of calf-rope lariat, heavy, gold as a fable, and corded.
“I been practicing,” he said. There was a sawhorse standing across the drive, up on two legs, like a man, with a hat on it, and a coat, and Hollingsworth said nothing else, but twirled the lariat over his head and then flung it at the sawhorse, a mean heavy whistle over their heads, and the loop settled over the sawhorse, and Hollingsworth stepped back quickly and tugged, cinched the loop shut. The sawhorse fell over, and Hollingsworth began dragging it across the gravel, reeling it in as fast as he could.
“I could lasso you off that road if I wanted,” Hollingsworth said.
Jesse thought about how the money would be nice. He thought about how it was in a wreck, too, when he wasn’t able to get his feet free of the clips and had to stay with the bike, and roll over with it, still wrapped up in it. It was just the way his sport was.
“I’ve got to be going,” he told Hollingsworth. When he stood up, though, he had been still too long, and his blood stayed down in his legs, and he saw spots and almost fell.
“Easy now, hoss,” Hollingsworth cautioned; watching him eagerly, eyes narrowed, hoping for an accident and no more riding.
The moonlight came in through Hollingsworth’s window, onto his bed, all night—it was silver. It made things look different: ghostly. Hollingsworth lay on his back, looking up at the ceiling.
We’ll get him, he thought. We’ll find his ass. But he couldn’t sleep, and the sound of his heart, the movement of his blood pulsing, was the roar of an ocean, and it wasn’t right. His father did not belong down in those woods. No one did. There was nothing down there that Hollingsworth could see but reptiles and danger.
The moon was so bright that it washed out all stars. Hollings-worth listened to the old house. There was a blister on the inside of his finger from practicing with the lariat, and he fingered it and looked at the ceiling.
“Let’s go hunt that old dog,” Hollingsworth said—it was the first thing he said, after Jesse had gotten his bottle out of the machine and opened it—and like a molester, a crooner, Hollingsworth seemed to be drifting toward Jesse without moving his feet: just leaning forward, swaying closer and closer, as if moving in to smell blossoms. His eyes were a believer’s blue, and for a moment, Jesse had no idea what he was talking about and felt dizzy. He looked into Hollingsworth’s eyes, such a pale wash of light, such a pale blue that he knew the eyes had never seen anything factual, nothing of substance—and he laughed, thinking of Hollingsworth trying to catch Buzbee, or anything, on his own.
“We can split the reward money,” Hollingsworth said again. He was grinning, smiling wildly, trying as hard as he could to show all his teeth and yet keep them close together, uppers and lowers touching. He breathed through the cracks in them in a low, pulsing whistle: in and out. He had never in his life drunk anything but water, and his teeth were startlingly white; they were just whittled down, was all, and puny from aging and time. He closed his eyes, squeezed them shut slowly, as if trying to remember something simple, like speech, or balance, or even breathing. He was like a turtle sunning on a log.
Jesse couldn’t believe he was speaking. “Give me all of it,” Jesse heard himself say.
“All of it,” Hollingsworth agreed, his eyes still shut, and then he opened them and handed the money to Jesse slowly, ceremoniously, like a child paying for something at a store counter for the first time.
Jesse unlaced his shoes, and folded the bills in half and slid them down into the soles, putting bills in both shoes. He unlaced the drawstring to his pants and slid some down into the black dampness of his racing silks: down in the crotch, and padding the buttocks, and in front, high on the flatness of his abdomen, like a girdle, directly below the cinching lace of the drawstring, which he then tied again, tighter than it had been before.
Then he got on the bike and rode home, slowly, not racing anymore, not at all; through the late-day heat that had built up, but with fall in the air, the leaves on the trees hanging differently. There was some stillness everywhere. He rode on.
When he got home he carried the bike inside, as was his custom, and then undressed, peeling his suit off, with the damp bills fluttering slowly to the old rug, unfolding when they landed, and it surprised him at first to see them falling away from him like that, all around him, for he had forgotten that they were down there as he rode.
Buzbee was like a field general. The women were tasting freedom, and seemed to be like circus strongmen, muscled with great strength suddenly from not being told what to do, from not being beaten or yelled at. They laughed and talked, and were kind to Buzbee. He sat up in the tree in his old khaki pants, and watched, and whenever it looked like his feeble son and the ex-biker might be coming, he leaped down from the tree, and like monkeys they scattered into the woods: back to another, deeper, temporary camp they had built.
They splashed across the river like wild things, but they were laughing, there was no fear, not like there would have been in animals.
They knew they could get away. They knew that as long as they ran fast, they would make it.
Buzbee grinned too, panting, his eyes bright, and he watched the women’s breasts float and bounce, riding high as they charged across; ankle-deep, knee-deep, waist-deep; hurrying to get away from his mad, lonely son: running fast and shrieking, because they were all afraid of the alligators.
Buzbee had a knife in one hand and a sharpened stick in the other, and he almost wished there would be an attack, so that he could be a hero.
The second camp was about two miles down into the swamp. No one had ever been that far into it, not ever. The mosquitoes were worse, too. There wasn’t any dry land, not even a patch, so they sat on the branches, and dangled their feet, and waited. Sometimes they saw black bears splashing after fish, and turtles. There were more snakes, too, deeper back, but the women were still bruised, and some of them fingered their bruises and scars as they watched the snakes, but no one went back.
They made up songs, with which they pretended to make the snakes go away.
It wasn’t too bad.
They sat through the night listening to the cries of birds, and when the woods began to grow light again, so faintly at first that they doubted it was happening, they would ease down into the water and start back toward their dry camp.
Hollingsworth would be gone, chased away by the mosquitoes, by the emptiness, and they would feel righteous, as if they’d won something: a victory.
None of them had a watch. They never knew what time it was, what day even.
“Gone,” said Hollingsworth.
He was out of breath, out of shape. His shoelaces were untied, and there were burrs in his socks. The camp was empty. Just chickens. And the godawful reptiles, twisting from the trees.
“Shit almighty,” said Jesse. His legs were cramping and he was bent over, massaging them: he wasn’t used to walking.
Hollingsworth poked around in the little grass-and-wood shacks. He was quivering and kept saying, alternately, “Gone” and “Damn.”
Jesse had to sit down, the pain in his legs was so bad. He put his feet together like a bear in the zoo and held the
m there, and rocked, trying to stretch them back out. He was frightened of the alligators, and he felt helpless, in his cramps, knowing that Buzbee could come up from behind with a club and rap him on the head, like one of the chickens, and he, Jesse, wouldn’t even be able to get up to stop him or run.
Buzbee was in control.
“Shit. Damn. Gone,” said Hollingsworth. He was running a hand through his thinning hair. He kicked a few halfhearted times at the shacks, but they were kicks of sorrow, not rage yet, and did no damage.
“We could eat the chickens,” Jesse suggested, from his sitting position. “We could cook them on his fire and leave the bones all over camp.” Jesse still had his appetite from his riding days, and was getting fat fast. He was eating all the time since he had stopped riding.
Hollingsworth turned to him, slightly insulted. “They belong to my father,” he said.
Jesse continued to rock, but thought: My God, what a madman.
He rubbed his legs and rocked. The pain was getting worse.
There was a breeze stirring. They could hear the leather and rope creaking, as some of the smaller alligators moved. There was a big alligator hanging from a beech tree, about ten feet off the ground, and as they watched it, the leather cord snapped, from the friction, and the dead weight of the alligator crashed to the ground.
“The mosquitoes are getting bad,” said Jesse, rising: hobbled, bent over. “We’d better be going.”
But Hollingsworth was already scrambling up through the brush, up toward the brightness of sky above the field. He could see the sky, the space, through the trees, and knew the field was out there. He was frantic to get out of the woods; there was a burning in his chest, in his throat, and he couldn’t breathe.
Jesse helped him across the field and got him home. He offered to ride into Crystal Springs, thirty miles, and make a call for an ambulance, but Hollingsworth waved him away.
“Just stay with me a little while,” he said. “I’ll be okay.”
But the thought was terrifying to Jesse—of being in the same room with Hollingsworth, contained, and listening to him talk, forever, all day and through the night, doubtless.