by Rick Bass
“I have to go,” Jesse said, and hurried out the door.
He got on his bike and started slowly for home. His knees were bumping against his belly, such was the quickness of his becoming fat, but the relief of being away from Hollingsworth was so great that he didn’t mind.
Part of him wanted to be as he had been, briefly: iron, and fast, racing with the fastest people in the world, it seemed—he couldn’t remember anything about them, only the blaze and rip of their speed, the whish-whish cutting sound they made, as a pack, tucking and sailing down around corners—but also, he was so tired of that, and it felt good to be away from it, for just a little while.
He could always go back.
His legs were still strong. He could start again any time. The sport of it, the road, would have him back. The other bikers would have him back, they would be happy to see him.
He thought all these things as he trundled fatly up the minor hills, the gradual rises: coasting—with relief—on the down sides.
Shortly before he got to the gravel turnoff, the little tree-lined road that led to his house, the other bikers passed him, coming from out of the west, and they screamed and howled at him, passing, and jabbed their thumbs down at him, as if they were trying to unplug a drain or poke a hole in something; they shrieked, and then they were gone, so quickly.
He wanted to hide somewhere, he was so ashamed of what he had lost, but there was nowhere to hide, for in a way it was still in him: the memory of it.
Later, he dreamed of going down into the woods, of joining Buzbee and starting over, wrestling alligators; but he only dreamed it—and in the morning, when he woke up, he was still heavy and slow, grounded.
He went into the kitchen, and looked in the refrigerator, and began taking things out. Maybe, he thought, Hollingsworth would up the reward money.
Buzbee enjoyed cooking for the women. It was going to be an early fall, and dry; they got to where they hardly noticed the mosquitoes that were always whining around them—a tiny buzzing—and they had stopped wearing clothes long ago. Buzbee pulled down hickory branches and climbed up in trees, often— and he sat hunkered above the women, looking down, just watching them move around in their lives, naked and happy, talking. More had come down the bayou since the first two, and they were shoring up the old shelter: pulling up palmetto plants from the hummocks and dragging logs across the clearing, fixing the largest of the abandoned cabins into a place that was livable, for all of them.
He liked the way they began to look at him, on about the tenth day of their being there, and he did not feel seventy-seven. He slid down out of the tree, walked across the clearing toward the largest woman, the one he had had his eye on, and took her hand, hugged her, felt her broad fat back, the backs of her legs, which were sweaty, and then her behind, while she giggled.
All that week, as the weather changed, they came drifting in, women from town, sometimes carrying lawn chairs, always wildeyed and tentative when they saw the alligators and catfish, the others moving around naked in camp, brown as the earth itself— but then they would recognize someone, and would move out into the clearing with wonder, and a disbelief at having escaped. A breeze might be stirring, and dry colored hardwood leaves, ash and hickory, and oak and beech, orange and gold, would tumble down into the clearing, spill around their ankles, and the leaves made empty scraping sounds when the women walked through them, shuffling, looking up at the spinning fish.
At night they would sit around the fire and eat the dripping juiciness of the alligators, roasted: fat, from the tails, sweet, glistening on their hands, their faces; running down to their elbows. They smeared it on their backs, their breasts, to keep the mosquitoes away. Nights smelled of wood smoke. They could see the stars above their trees, above the shadows of their catches.
The women had all screamed and run into the woods, in different directions, the first time Buzbee leaped into the water after an alligator; but now they all gathered close and applauded and chanted an alligator-catching song they had made up that had few vowels, whenever he wrestled them. But that first time they thought he had lost his mind: he had rolled around and around in the thick gray-white slick mud, down by the bank, jabbing the young alligator with his pocketknife again and again, perforating it and muttering savage dog noises, until they could no longer tell which was which, except for the jets of blood that spurted out of the alligator’s fat belly—but after he had killed the reptile, and rinsed off in the shallows, and come back across the oxbow, wading in knee-deep water, carrying it in his arms, a four-footer, his largest ever, he was smiling, gap-toothed, having lost two in the fight, but he was also erect, proud, and ready for love. It was the first time they had seen that.
The one he had hugged went into the hut after him.
The other women walked around the alligator carefully, and poked sticks at it, but also glanced toward the hut and listened, for the brief and final end of the small thrashings, the little pleasure, that was going on inside, the confirmation, and presently it came: Buzbee’s goatish bleats, and the girl’s too, which made them look at one another with surprise, wonder, interest, and speculation.
“It’s those berries he’s eatin,” said one, whose name was Ones-simius. Oney.
“They tastes bad,” said Tasha.
“They makes your pee turn black,” said Oney.
They looked at her with caution.
Jesse didn’t have the money for a car, or even for an old tractor.
He bought a used lawn-mower engine instead, for fifteen dollars; he found some old plywood in a dry abandoned barn. He scrounged some wheels, and stole a fan belt from a car rotting in a field, with bright wildflowers growing out from under the hood and mice in the back seat. He made a go-cart, and put a long plastic antenna with an orange flag, a banner, on the back of it that reached high into the sky, so that any motorists coming would see it.
But there was never any traffic. He sputtered and coughed up the hills, going one, two miles an hour: then coasting down, a slight breeze in his face. He didn’t wear his biking helmet, and the breeze felt good.
It took him an hour to get to Hollingsworth’s sometimes; he carried a sack lunch with him, apples and potato chips, and ate, happily, as he drove.
He started out going over to Hollingsworth’s in the mid-morning, and always tried to come back in the early afternoon, so that the bikers would not see him; but it got more and more to where he didn’t care, and finally, he just came and went as he pleased, waving happily when he saw them. But they never waved back. Sometimes the one who had replaced him, the trailing one, would spit water from his thermos bottle onto the top of Jesse’s head as he rushed past; but they were gone quickly, almost as fast as they had appeared, and soon he was no longer thinking about them. They were gone.
Cottonwoods. Rabbits. Fields. It was still summer, it seemed it would always be summer; the smell of hay was good, and dry. All summer, they cut hay in the fields around him.
The go-cart rumbled along, carrying him; threatening to stop on the hill, but struggling on. He was a slow movement of color going up the hills, with everything else in his world motionless; down in the fields, black Angus grazed, and cattle egrets stood behind them and on their backs. Crows sat in the dead limbs of trees, back in the woods, watching him, watching the cows, waiting for fall.
He would reach Hollingsworth’s, and the old man would be waiting, like a child: wanting his father back. It was a ritual. Hollingsworth would wave, tiredly: hiding in his heart the delight at seeing another person.
Jesse would wave back as he drove up into the gravel drive. He would grunt and pull himself up out of the little go-cart, and go over to the Coke machine.
The long slide of the bottle down the chute; the rattle, and clunk.
They’d sit on the porch, and Hollingsworth would begin to talk.
“I saw one of those explode in a man’s hand,” he said, pointing to the bottle Jesse was drinking. “Shot a sliver of glass as long as a knife
up into his forearm, all the way. He didn’t feel a thing: he just looked at it, and then walked around, pointing to it, showing everybody . . .”
Hollingsworth remembered everything that had ever happened to him. He told Jesse everything.
Jesse would stir after the second or third story. He couldn’t figure it out; he couldn’t stand to be too close to Hollingsworth, to listen to him for more than twenty or thirty minutes—he hated it after that point—but always, he went back; every day.
It was as if he got full, almost to the point of vomiting; but then he got hungry again.
He sat on the porch and drank Cokes, and ate cans and cans of whatever Hollingsworth had on the shelf: yams, mushrooms, pickles, deviled ham—and he knew, as if it were an equation on a blackboard, that his life had gone to hell—he could see it in the size of his belly resting between his soft legs—but he didn’t know what to do.
There was a thing that was not in him anymore, and he did not know where to go to find it.
Oney was twenty-two and had had a bad husband. She still had the stiches in her forehead: he had thrown a chair at her, because she had called him a lard-ass, which he was. The stitches in the center of her head looked like a third eyebrow, with the eye missing. She hadn’t heard about the old days of yellow fever and what it could do to one person, or everyone.
One night, even though she slept in Buzbee’s arms, and even though the night was still and warm, she began to shiver wildly. And then two days later, again, she shivered and shook all night, and then two days later, a third time: it was coming every forty-eight hours, which was how it had been when Buzbee and Hollingsworth had had it.
Oney had been pale to begin with, and was turning, as if with the leaves, yellow, right in front of them: a little brighter yellow each day. All of the women began to eat the berries, slowly at first, and then wolfishly, watching Oney as they ate them.
They had built a little palmetto coop for their remaining chickens, which were laying regularly, and they turned them out, three small white magicians moving through the woods in search of bugs, seeds, and berries, and the chickens split up and wandered in different directions, and Buzbee and all the women split up, too, and followed them single file, at a distance, waiting for the chickens to find more berries, but somehow two of the chickens got away from them, escaped, and when they came back to camp, with the one remaining white chicken, a large corn snake was in the rooster’s cage and was swallowing him, with only his thrashing feet showing: the snake’s mouth hideous and wide, eyes wide and unblinking, mouth stretched into a laugh, as if he was enjoying the meal. Buzbee killed the snake, but the rooster died shortly after being pulled back out.
Oney screamed and cried, and shook until she was spitting up more black blood, when they told her they were going to take her back into town, and she took Buzbee’s pocketknife and pointed it between her breasts and swore she would kill herself if they tried to make her go back to Luscious. And so they let her stay, and fed her their dwindling berry supply, and watched the stars, the sunset, and hoped for a hard and cold winter and an early freeze, but the days stayed warm, though the leaves were changing on schedule, and always, they looked for berries, and began experimenting, too, with the things Buzbee and Hollingsworth had tried so many years ago: cedar berries, mushrooms, hickory nuts, acorns. They smeared grease from the fish and alligators over every inch of their bodies, and kept a fire going again, at all times.
None of the women would go back to town. And none of them other than Oney had started spitting up blood or shivering yet. Ozzie, Buzbee’s first woman, had missed her time.
And Buzbee sat up in the trees and looked down on them often, and stopped eating his berries, unbeknownst to them, so that there would be more for them. The alligators hung from the trees like dead insurgents, traitors to a way of life. They weren’t seeing any more in the bayou, and he wasn’t catching nearly as many fish. The fall was coming, and winter beyond that. The animals knew it first. Nothing could prevent its coming, or even slow its approach: nothing they could do would matter. Buzbee felt fairly certain that he had caught enough alligators.
Hollingsworth and Jesse made another approach a week later. Hollingsworth had the lariat and was wearing cowboy boots and a hat. Jesse was licking a Fudgicle.
Buzbee, in his tree, spotted them and jumped down.
“Shit,” said Hollingsworth when they got to the camp. “He saw us coming again.”
“He runs away,” said Jesse, nodding. They could see the muddy slide marks where Buzbee and the women had scrambled out on the other side. The dark wall of trees, a wall.
“I’ve got an idea,” said Hollingsworth.
They knew where Buzbee and the women were getting their firewood from: a tremendous logjam, with driftwood stacked all along the banks, not far from the camp.
Hollingsworth and Jesse went and got shovels, and some old mattresses from the dump, and came back and dug pits: huge, deep holes, big enough to bury cars, big enough to hold a school bus.
“I saw it on a Tarzan show,” said Hollingsworth. His heart was burning; both of the men were dripping with sweat. It was the softest, richest dirt in the world, good and loose and black and easy to move, but they were out of shape and it took them all day. They sang as they dug, to keep Buzbee and the women at bay, hemmed in, back in the trees.
Buzbee and the women sat up on their branches, swatting at mosquitoes, and listened, and wondered what was going on.
“Row, row, row your boat!” Jesse shouted as he dug, his big belly wet, like a melon. Mopping his brow; his face streaked, with dirt and mud. He remembered the story about the pioneers who went crazy alone and dug their own graves: standing at the edge, then, and doing it.
“Oh, say—can—you—see,” Hollingsworth brayed, “by the dawn’s earl—lee—light?”
Back in the trees, the women looked at Buzbee for an explanation. They knew it was his son.
“He was born too early,” he said weakly. “He has never been right.”
“He misses you,” said Oney. “That boy wants you to come home.”
Buzbee scowled and looked down at his toes, hunkered on the branch, and held on fiercely, as if the tree had started to sway.
“That boy don’t know what he wants,” he said.
When Hollingsworth and Jesse had finished the pits, they spread long branches over them, then scattered leaves and twigs over the branches.
“We’ll catch the whole tribe of them,” Hollingsworth cackled.
Jesse nodded. He was faint, and didn’t know if he could make it all the way back out or not. He wondered vaguely what Buzbee and the women would be having for supper.
The mosquitoes were vicious; the sun was going down. Owls were beginning to call.
“Come on,” said Hollingsworth. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
Jesse wanted to stay. But he felt Hollingsworth pull on his arm; he let himself be led away.
Back in the woods, up in the tree, Oney began to shiver, and closed her eyes, lost consciousness, and fell. Buzbee leaped down and gathered her up, held her tightly, and tried to warm her with his body.
“They gone,” said a woman named Vesuvius. The singing had gone away when it got dark, as had the ominous sound of digging.
There was no moon, and it was hard, even though they were familiar with it, to find their way back to camp.
They built fires around Oney, and two days later she was better.
But they knew it would come again.
“Look at what that fool boy of yours has done,” Tasha said the next day. A deer had fallen into one of the pits and was leaping about, uninjured, trying to get free.
Buzbee said his favorite curse word, a new one that Oney had told him, “Fuckarama,” and they tried to rope the deer, but it was too wild: it would not let them get near.
“We could stone it,” Tasha said, but not with much certainty; and they all knew they could not harm the deer, trapped as it was, so helpless.
> Then at dusk they saw Oney’s husband moving through the woods, perilously close to their camp, moving through the gray trees, stalking their woods with a shotgun.
They hid in their huts and watched, hoping he would not look down the hill and see their camp, not see the alligators hanging.
Oney was whimpering. Her husband’s dark, slow shape moved cautiously about, but the light was going fast: that darkness of purple, all light being drawn away. He faded; he disappeared; it was dark. Then, in the night, they heard a yell and a blast, and then the quietest silence they had ever known.
It was a simple matter burying him in the morning. They hadn’t thought of letting the deer out that way. They had not thought of filling in the pit partially, so that the deer could walk out.
“You will get better,” they told Oney. She believed them. On the days in which she did not have the fever, she believed them. There was still, though, the memory of it.
It was escapable. Some people lived through it and survived. It didn’t get everyone. They didn’t all just lie down and die, those who got it.
She loved old Buzbee, on her good days. She laughed, and slept with him, rolled with him, and put into the back of her mind what had happened before, and what would be happening again.
Her teeth, when she was laughing, pressing against him, clutching him, shutting her eyes. She would fight to keep it in the back of her mind, and to keep it behind her.
Jesse rode out to Hollingsworth’s in the go-cart. He took a back road, a different route. The air was cooler, it seemed that summer could be ending, after all, and he felt like just getting out and seeing the country again. It was a road he had always liked to ride on, with or without the pack, back when he had been racing, and he had forgotten how fresh it had been, how it had tasted, just to look at it. He drove through a tunnel of trees; a pasture, on the other side of the trees, a stretch of pastel green, a smear of green, with charcoal cattle standing in it, and white egrets at their sides, pressed an image into the sides of his slow-moving vision. It was almost cold down in the creek bottom, going through the shade, so slowly.