The Watch Read online

  THE WATCH

  STORIES

  RICK BASS

  W. W. Norton & Company

  NEW YORK LONDON

  For

  Timothy Schaffner

  and

  Carol Houck Smith

  CONTENTS

  Mexico

  Choteau

  The Watch

  Cats and Students, Bubbles and Abysses

  Juggernaut

  Mississippi

  In Ruth’s Country

  Wild Horses

  The Government Bears

  Redfish

  THE WATCH

  MEXICO

  Kirby’s faithful. He’s loyal: Kirby has fidelity. He has one wife, Tricia. The bass’s name is Shack. The fish is not in an aquarium. It’s in the swimming pool that Kirby built, out in his and Tricia’s front yard.

  It’s a big pool. I believe it can hold a twenty-three pounder. When we’re drunk, I’m sure of it. That sweet suck of lime: the beer, so cold. Some way you have got to get by in Houston these days. Hell will come here first, when it opens. Everyone here’s already dead. The heat killed them or something. People don’t even fall in love here anymore: it’s just the pelvic thrust, and occasionally children as the result. There’s no love, and that’s the surest sign of death.

  Kirby paddles around in his scuba gear and watches Shack; makes sure she doesn’t construct any plans about leaving, slipping off somehow to the bayou, which calls from nearby. Shack is a F10rida hybrid, the kind that can put on two or three pounds a year. Tricia’s from a warm climate too. I’m a neighbor—Kirby’s best, and only, friend—and the pool is deep. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you how deep.

  Kirby sprinkled stumps, gravel, old trees, down into the pool for structure. Kirby’s volatile. When his old Volkswagen broke, fuel injectors yet again, he pushed the whole car into the clear water. It floated down like a blue heavy bubble: it bounced in slow motion when it landed. Shack lives down in the backseat now. Shack is a female, of course; they grow faster and larger, and are more aggressive. I help Kirby guard the pool from the neighborhood kids fishing it. Word got out. It’s hard to tell, but it looks like she’ll go about eight or nine pounds already. Kirby bought her for a dollar from a fish hatchery three years ago. She was six inches long, thin, like a cigar.

  “That one,” he said, pointing into the sea of fingerlings that was moving away from us wherever we followed, shifting and flowing back the other way in the big tank. The boy with the net was perplexed.

  “That one,” Kirby said. “I want that one.” This, three years ago. He picked a good one.

  Tricia lies out by the pool in her swimsuit with her buddies. They drink Corona beer and margaritas, and wear their sunglasses. Houston presses down. Being Southern ladies, they can’t tan. They just get wetter and wetter, sweating the beer out, and they get hotter and hotter, sometimes managing to turn an attractive, even luscious shade of pink, like the sweet part of meat deep up inside a crab’s or a lobster’s claws. None of Tricia’s girlfriends will go swimming, not even for a dip, no matter how hot it gets—a hundred, a hundred and three—because they know the fish is in there, and that it is a big one. They’ve never seen the fish. It’s just the idea, something big being down there below them that they can’t see, that frightens them. I can understand.

  Even Tricia won’t go in, not even with Kirby, and Tricia’s different. Tricia goes to the bullfights in Nuevo Laredo with us, and she doesn’t turn back from them, doesn’t turn away. In fact, she loves them.

  She wears her sundress, one of many, and tilts her big sunglasses up over her hair, which is the color of good wheat, and up in the stadium, at these bullfights, she’ll rise to her feet. We’ll have been drinking margaritas all day until we’re as limp as puppets, and she’ll stand up and cup her hands, while Kirby and I sit on the bleachers and sway, trying to focus on what is happening down in the arena with bloodshot eyes that hurt to look.

  “Kill him,” she shouts; she’s screaming. It’s an affront, the way that bull refuses to die. The brave man in the center: the animal threatening his existence, challenging him. “Kill him!” she screams, turning red in the face, the sun, the heat, the blood drying in the sand, the margaritas. Kirby and I look at her, mortified, too drunk to talk, but-it’s-just-a-bull, Tricia, please sit down . . . but we don’t ever attempt to calm her, to ask her to please sit down. You can’t control some things, and that’s what makes them the best. We love to go to the bullfights with Tricia.

  She doesn’t let up; and the people sitting all around us, it’s just a Sunday afternoon, something to do, but they start to get caught up in her excitement, and they’re rising to their feet too, shouting things in Spanish now, applauding the matador, looking over at Tricia, applauding her red face, her shrill American cries—and it is more fun for Kirby and me to watch her than the fights themselves, and Kirby and I sit on either side of her and look up at her, and we marvel.

  When it rains, when the floodwaters lap around the edges of the pool, Kirby turns on the underwater floodlights situated around the perimeter at various depths, as in a regular swimming pool, and the three of us, and any of the neighborhood kids who can be trusted, circle around and around, barefooted and in our shorts, slapping the top of the water with bamboo poles, keeping Shack at bay. We don’t want her to get too curious and realize there’s a way out. It doesn’t flood often; Kirby’s and Tricia’s house is on the largest hill on the street, a wonderful imperial wooded knob, but if the storm is sudden enough, it can happen. The underwater lights shoot fuzzy beams from all directions across the pool, like a submerged Hollywood opening, solid beams of spinning underwater mote debris, through which Shack’s large dark shadow sometimes passes, moving slowly, caudal fins spinning, deep below, looking up as if judging: it’s definitely a competition. The record is twenty-two pounds and four ounces, and that was fifty years ago.

  The outdoor magazines say such a fish would be worth a million dollars. Kirby is foolish enough to believe them, and Tricia, lovely enough. I’m just along for the ride: to see if it can be done. It is like the beer commercial, the one that says you-can-have-it-all (“Yes!” cries the chorus). Kirby and Tricia want to move to Eagle Pass, down on the border, and build a castle with the money. I’d be sad to see them go. Kirby bought me the house I live in: loaned me the money for it, rather. They’ve been married three years, and as best as I can tell, have gotten all the fighting out of their system. They really love each other. I like to see that.

  We go to Mexico, so often. We know that drive; we know which flights leave, and when. Sometimes we’ll take the train down there, and drink all the way down. If anything gets even a little out of sync—a hangnail, an obscene phone call, the appearance of chinch bugs in the yard across the street—we head for Mexico.

  Gus fishes Kirby’s pool some nights. It’s like a Greek tragedy; I’m bound in the inexorable whorl, the clash of the triangle. There’s nothing I can do. Gus claims to have hooked Shack often.

  “I’m on to what she likes,” he says. He snaps his dirty fingers. “Yellow crankbaits, with a pork rind trailer, dipped in horse urine; I can catch her, just like that ” The reason his fingers are always dirty is from the various odd jobs, his strong money greed, and he has trouble snapping them. He tries and tries; then gets it. Poor Gus. Kirby has fired on Gus before: rained heavy-grained bullets used normally only for deer hunting into Gus’s old truck, popping out the windshield once, hitting the gas tank another time, though it did not explode. Gus driving quickly and without his fishing tackle into the night. Kirby, in his underwear, Tricia in her robe. Lights up and down the street.

  “They were trying to steal SHACK!” he shouts into the night, an explanation to the neighbors. And they know, or think, that Kirby is pure b
luster, and the lights go back off, and Tricia takes the gun from him, steers him back into the house—he wants to don his scuba gear and turn on the underwater lights and check right away, go search for his fish—but somehow Tricia gets him into the house, and we all settle back in, to the night, in our homes, to our sleep, in the darkness.

  Gus and Kirby and I used to be roommates, before Tricia. Money is strong; it can assemble almost anything, do everything. We lived in a trailer in one of those camps with crushed-shell drives clustering out from one central power facility/post-of-fice-box center. We all plugged in to this one light pole, and rent, once we had split it three ways, was $45 a month. It was dark in that shell of a trailer, and Kirby and I came to hate just the sight of Gus’s face, because he was happy. He had big glasses and a horse-ass smile, and was always rubbing his hands together. Kirby didn’t have Tricia then, as I’ve mentioned, not yet, and I was miserable too, just because I was still young then, hadn’t yet outgrown my unhappiness, and we grew to hate Gus more and more, like the buzz of a fly that cannot be seen but is in the room. Gus was in our lives.

  Gus had money too, which made us hate him more. All his fucking jobs: and all he did with his money was spend it. He was always ordering things off of the TV, ordering pizzas delivered to our trailer. If you could buy any sort of service, pay someone to do something for you—anything—Gus would give money, spend, to have someone give him something: anything. He couldn’t get enough.

  He dialed those places in Florida where they talk dirty to you: a girl telling you what she wants to do to you—though I suppose there was a number you could dial and have a guy come on the line instead. What I’m saying is that Gus had money and that was all, and his soul was dead and we hated him even more because he had the option of not living in that trailer. He could have bought a house in town with a cool garden, and shade, and a breakfast room window. Sun, and wind chimes with their tinkle. He lived in the trailer instead, because he liked living with us. We were in that dark hell for four years: 208 weeks.

  I don’t want to hear any of that old song about how it couldn’t have been that bad. I don’t want to hear it. I’ve got a nice house, three houses down from Kirby’s, on the same street. If you want to know, it’s far and away one of the nicest streets in Houston. My house cost $325,000; Kirby’s more. If I pay Kirby $5,000 a year, I can have it paid for in sixty-five years. I’m a little behind, already.

  It’s near the bayou, where we live. There are tall pine trees. When you drive in at night, back late from dinner, there are rabbits on the lawns in the moonlight. There’s some rich sons of bitches that live out here: so rich, so secure, that they don’t even need to be offended, or threatened, by Kirby and me, by the pool, by Tricia drinking margaritas in the front yard in her swimsuit. That’s how nice it is.

  We got out of college, and for graduation Kirby’s grandfather gave Kirby a bunch—about a hundred—of little oil wells that he’d accumulated over the years, just throw-away things that he had, sprinkled all throughout the state: slow, toy pumpers, almost make-believe in their movements—stripper wells that Mr. Simmons had been carrying for tax purposes. But instead of Kirby’s living off the rather comfortable monthly production checks from all these wells, as Mr. Simmons had no doubt pleasantly and responsibly visualized, Kirby turned right around and sold them, when reserves were going for $42 a barrel on the spot market, for cold cash, every last one of them. One of the wells had something funny happen to it—a recompletion, they called it—and was suddenly worth many hundreds of times more than what they thought it was—and Kirby, with this great wash of money, fled the trailer, left Gus, and bought the house back in the trees in which he now lives, and he bought me the house I live in, too, while both of us were still breathing hard, in our flight from Gus. Also, that’s when he built the pool.

  So I don’t want anyone to think that Gus wasn’t bad. It was like being in a coffin, like being tied up in a plastic garbage bag with rotten meat, and dead things, the stuff that comes out from beneath your teeth when you floss after sleeping all night, and we’d never been that close to such a thing before: didn’t even know it existed. I’m so glad Kirby got the oil.

  Gus had a dog for a while when we were first living with him: a girl dog that he called Bitch.

  Maybe Gus’s behavior and attitude toward women is what made us love them so much. Almost beyond reason. You’ve never seen anyone take care of someone the way Kirby looks after Tricia. If you think lending me the money for the house was nice, you should see how he treats Tricia. I think Kirby’s good to us because both of us were just victims of Gus: me, through my college years; and Tricia because she was a woman.

  Once when we were drunk and driving around in the country on a weekend, back in college, driving Gus’s truck, which was still new, just driving through fields, scaring up meadowlarks, chasing them down the sides of hills, for a thing to do, Kirby told Gus that in Mexico, and all foreign countries, and even in certain parts of Houston, the way you told a girl you wanted to sleep with her—“to do it, Gus,” Kirby said—was to throw pieces of banana at her. We told Gus the various sections of Houston in which to try this: that the newest thing in the city for girls on the make was to pretend to be waiting for a bus, at the bus stop.

  “What they’re really waiting for, Gus, my man,” Kirby told him, “is bananas.”

  Meadowlarks leaped up in wild alarm, flew down the hills. We thundered across logs, over rocks, down into creek bottoms, chasing them as if they were butterflies, the truck bouncing and jolting. Gus driving: a wild thing, but dead. He didn’t love.

  Tricia has these wonderful earrings, pale blue, with silver in them, that go well with her blue eyes, and her smile, and her hair. Kirby got them for her on one of their trips down to Mexico. They hold hands a lot of the time, even in this, their fourth year. Kirby had known her less than a month when they married. There was a franticness about it that somehow made it more beautiful. Gus and I were in the wedding, and also a couple of Kirby’s cousins, guys roughly our age, from down around Corpus Christi. It was a pretty odd assemblage. I mean, he just didn’t know anybody. And he was selling those oil wells off hand over fist in those days, a new batch every day. Things were going fast. We were escaping, both of us, getting away. We didn’t think, not then, that anything was following: that was how fast we were moving. We thought nothing could follow.

  Tricia has this very nice Roman sort of nose, it looks good on a younger woman or even an older one, it makes her look imperious, but what I liked even better about Tricia—better than this imperiousness—was its opposite, her amazement, while all this stuff was going on: the wedding plans, the moving trucks, the whirl. Who are these people, Kirby? Shying away from Gus instinctively. The two cousins, Rocky and Jake, bull riders, cowboys from the coast with tans and mustaches. Cajun accents, some-how.

  There’s a bar not four blocks away from our houses. You walk out to the interstate, from our woods, and it’s on the frontage road: the Cadillac Bar and Grill, an Americanized version of the real one that’s down in Nuevo Laredo. People go to this one for lunch in the day, and after work for drinks. Work. Kirby and I laugh at them.

  They serve Corona beer there. It’s hard to get: the Mexican National Brewery only made seven thousand cases this year (last year they only made three thousand). It’s the In beer, now, in Houston. You’re supposed to be seen drinking Corona. Also it tastes good, it seems to get colder than other beers—the thickness of the bottles, I think. This bar on the frontage road, the pseudo-Cadillac, has lots of Corona. Kirby and I walk home, clawing through people’s yards, swinging at the shrubbery, falling to our knees, getting up, struggling home, breathing heavily from the beer: that Houston sweat of night. Kirby’s big house up in the trees, with the floodlights, is like a tabernacle, a state capitol. It’s like the last hole on a golf course: the clubhouse.

  The smaller fish in the pool leap and play, chasing June bugs and moths all night. We’re full of beer, and our hands a
re greasy from the nachos, or whatever they had that night. Finger enchiladas. The taco bar. We know Shack is down there.

  Often we sit in the lawn chairs, back in the shadows, and watch the smaller fish: they are brave under the night lights. Bug heaven. Kirby squeezes one eye nearly shut, like a detective, and watches for the children to come sneaking up the lawn, with their fishing tackle. Once some of the teenagers in the neighborhood poured a can of gas into the pool and lit the slick; we were all in the house, playing Uno. We felt the thump of hot air jumping, even inside. It was like one of the Civil War movies when the powder room goes.

  Fire trucks came and had to spray foam into the pool. It killed most of the fish. We knew it wouldn’t kill Shack; she would be staying down in the VW, in the deep below the flames and the poisons. Fish like that can live to be fifteen, twenty years old. They’re smart.

  Around two in the morning, when we’ve had a good one at the Cadillac and are out in the lawn chairs, Tricia will bring cotton sheets out and drape them over us, so that we look like chairs in a museum, covered from the dust. Once when she did this Kirby woke up but kept his eyes shut, and then when she bent over him to cover him, he leaped up and yelled “Boo!” He loves her dearly, and they have their whole lives to spend together.

  The pool is low on minnows. We drive to a place Kirby knows, and seine minnows: hundreds of them, even thousands, thick and silver, leaping over the net like tiny salmon. Tricia sits on the hood of the car in her straw hat and watches. It’s something to do. She’s still moving forward. It’s been three years, and I have to wonder if they ever talk about having children. It’s none of my business to ask.

  The rehearsal dinner was up in the Petroleum Building, on the fortieth floor. We drank wine and wore our suits and Gus was awed by the beauty of Tricia, of the bridesmaids, and he behaved, and his teeth, in the light from all the candles, were yellow, and brown, and cracked. His eyes thought all the wrong things as he looked around at the peace, at the joy.