The Lives of Rocks (2 page)

 

By mid-September Kirby and Richard were bringing Annie out to play the bathysphere game, and to view their slag island. They would come out on lunch break, and would skip a class before and sometimes after to buy them the time they needed. There was a bohemian French-African oceanography teacher who was retiring that year and who could see plainly what Richard, if not Kirby, was trying to do, chasing the heart of the young girl, the junior. The teacher—Miss Counteé, who wore a beret—would write hall passes for all three of them, knowing full well that they would be leaving campus, issuing the passes under the stipulation that they bring back specimens for her oceanography lab. They drove through the early autumn heat with the windows down and an old green canoe on top of their car. They paddled out to the new slag island and had picnics of French bread and green apples and cheese.

They piled lawn chairs atop the edifice. And even though the water was poisoned, the sound of it, as they lay there in the sun with their sleeves rolled up and their shoes and socks off, eyes closed, was the same as would be the sound of waves in the Bahamas, or a clear cold stream high in the mountains. Just because the water was ugly did not mean it had to sound ugly.

Richard knew that to the rest of the world Annie might have appeared slightly gangly, even awkward, but that had
nothing to do with how his heart leapt now each time he saw her—and after they began traveling to the river, he started to notice new things about her. Her feet pale in the sun, her shoulders rounding, her breasts lifting. A softening in her eyes as the beauty in her heart began to rise out of her. And many years later, after their lives separated, he would believe that there was something about the sound, the harmonics, of that ravaged river and her ability to love it, and take pleasure in it, that released something from within her: transforming in ancient alchemy the beautiful unseen into the beautifully tangible.

 

The water lapping lightly against the edges of the green canoe, tethered to one of the steel spars midpile. Umbrellas for parasols: crackers and cheese. Annie's pale feet browning in the sun. Perspiration at their temples, under their arms, in the small of their backs. Richard felt himself descending, sinking deeper into love, or what he supposed was love. How many years, he wondered, before the two of them were married and they would browse upon each other, in similar sunlight, in another country, another life? He was content to wait forever.

It was, however, as if Annie's own fire, the quiet green one, would not or could not quite merge with his leaping, dancing orange one. As if the two fires (or three fires) needed to be in each other's company and were supported, even fed, by each other's warmth—but that they could not, or would not yet, combine.

Without true heat of conviction, Annie would sometimes try to view the two boys separately, and would even, in her girl's way, play or pretend at imagining a future. Kirby, she
told herself, was more mature, more responsible—he could run an old crane! As well, there was an instinct that seemed to counsel her to both be drawn toward yet also move away from Richard's own more exposed fires and energies.

It was too much work to consider; it was all pretend anyway, or almost pretend. They had found a lazy place, a sweet place, to hang out, in the eddy between childhood and whatever came next. She told herself that she would be happy to wait there forever, and, for a while, she believed that.

 

Occasionally, the befouled river would ignite spontaneously; other times, they found that they could light it themselves by tossing matches or flaming oily rags out onto its oil and chemical slicks. None of the three of them was a church-goer, though Annie, a voracious reader, had been carrying around a Bible that autumn, reading it silently on their picnics while crunching an apple. The bayou breeze, river breeze, stirring her strawberry hair.

“I want to give the river a blessing,” she said the first time she saw the river ignite. The snaky, wandering river fires, in various bright petrochemical colors, seemed more like a celebration than a harbinger of death or poison, and they told themselves that through such incinerations they were doing the river a favor, helping to rid it of excess toxins.

They loaded their green canoe with gallon jugs of water the next day, tap water straight from their Houston faucets and hoses.

The canoe rode low in the poisoned water on their short trip out to the iron-and-chrome island, carrying the load of the three of them as well as their jugs of water. The gunwales of their green boat were no more than an inch above the vile
murk of the river, and they sat in the canoe as still as perched birds to avoid capsizing, letting the current carry them to the island of trash.

Once there, they spent nearly the rest of the afternoon scrubbing with steel wool and pouring the clean bright water over the crusted, rusted, mud-slimed ornamenture of bumpers and freezers, boat hulls and car bodies. They polished the chrome appurtenances and rinsed the mountain anew. They waded around its edges, oblivious to the sponges of their own pure skin taking in the river's, and the world's, poison.

When they had it sparkling, Annie climbed barefoot to the top and read a quote from Jeremiah: “And I brought you into the plentiful country, to eat the fruit thereof and the goodness thereof; but when ye entered, ye defiled my land and made mine heritage an abomination.”

On her climb up to the top, she had gashed her foot on the rusted corner of one sharp piece or another. She paid it no mind as she stood up there in her overalls, her red-brown hair stirring in the wind, a startlingly bright trickle of blood leaking from her pale foot, and Richard had the uneasy feeling that something whole and vital and time-crafted, rare and pure, was leaking out of her through that wound, and that he—with his strange vision of the world and his half-assed, dreamy shenanigans—was partly responsible: if not for leading her directly astray, then at least for leading her down the path to the flimsy or even unlatched gate, and showing her a view beyond.

And Kirby, too, viewing her blood, felt an almost overpowering wave of tenderness, and with his bare hand quickly wiped the blood from her foot, then put his arm around her as if to comfort her, though she did not feel discomforted:
and now the two of them sank a bit deeper into the fields of love, like twin pistons dropping a little deeper, leaving Richard off-balance for a moment, for a day, poised above, distanced now...

 

There was no clean water left with which to rinse or purify themselves after the ceremony. Instead they burned handfuls of green Johnson grass, wands of slow-swirling blue smoke. Like pagans, they paddled back to shore, mucked across the oily sandbar, and while Richard and Kirby were loading the canoe back onto the car, Annie went off into the tall waving grass to pee, and when she came back she was carrying a dead white egret: not one of the splendid but common yellow-legged cattle egrets but a larger and much rarer snowy egret (within their lifetime it would all but vanish), whiter than even the clouds—so white that as Annie carried it it seemed to glow. And it had died so recently that it was still limp.

She laid it down in the grass for them to examine. They stroked its head, and the long crested plumes flowing from the head. Perhaps it was only sleeping. Perhaps they could resuscitate it. Kirby stretched the wings out into a flying position, then folded them back in tight against the body. Nothing. Annie's eyes watered, and again Kirby felt the overpowering wave of tenderness that was not brotherly but stronger, wilder, fiercer: as if it came from the river itself.

It seemed that the obvious thing to do would be to bury the egret, but they couldn't bring themselves to give such beauty back to the earth, much less to such an oily, drippy, poisoned earth, and so they took the canoe and paddled back out to the island and laid the bird—fierce-eyed and thick-beaked—to rest in the crown of the island, staring
downriver like a gunner in his turret, with the breeze stirring his elegant plumage and a wreath of green grass in a garland around his snowy neck.

This time on the way out they remembered their oceanography assignment and scooped up a mayonnaise jar full of water and sediment that was the approximate color and consistency of watery diarrhea, and swabbed a dip net through the grass shallows, coming up with a quick catch of crabs and bent-backed, betumored mullet minnows. Then they loaded the canoe and drove back to school through the brilliant heat, the brilliant light, the three of them riding in the front seat together.

When they got back to school—a feeling like checking back into a jail—they hurried up the stairwell with their fetid bounty, late to class as usual, and placed their murky-watered bottles on the cool marble lab table at the front of the room for the rest of the class to see.

Miss Counteé made alternating clucking sounds of pleasure and then dismay as she examined the macro invertebrates as well as the crippled vertebrates, murmuring their names in genus and species, not as if naming them but as if greeting old acquaintances, old warriors, perhaps, from another time and place—and the other students got up from their seats and crowded around the jars and bottles as if to be closer to the presence of magic.

Richard and Annie and Kirby would still have the marsh scent of the river on them, and the blue smoke odor of burnt Johnson grass, and sometimes, for a moment, Miss Counteé and the students would get the strange feeling that the true wildness was not the catch in the mayonnaise jars but the catchers themselves.

Miss Counteé took an eyedropper and drew up a shot of dead Sabine, dripped it onto a slide, slid it under a microscope, and then crooned at all the violent erratica dashing about beneath her: the athleticism and diversity, the starts and stops and lunges, the silky passages, the creepings and slitherings, the throbbings and pulsings.

The river was dying, but it was still alive.

 

By October the leaves on the wounded trees at water's edge were turning yellow, and Annie was riding in the bathysphere.

As the sphere tumbled, she could orient herself to the surface by the bright glare above—the bouncy, jarring ride to the bottom, the tumultuous drift downstream, and then the shuddering tautness when the cable reached full draw. Usually she was busy laughing or praying for her life, but sometimes, at full stretch, she considered sex.

The crane lifted the sphere free and clear of the river: back into that bright light, water cascading off the bathysphere and glittering in sheets and torrents of sun diamonds (the awful river transformed, in that moment, into something briefly beautiful). Sometimes, to tease her, the boys would let her remain down there just a beat or two longer, each time: just long enough for the precursor of a thought to begin to enter her mind, the image that—despite their obvious affection for her—something had snapped within them. Not quite the thought, but the advancing shadow of the thought—the chemical synapses stirring and shifting, rearranging themselves to accommodate the approaching, imagined conception—of the boys, her friends, climbing down from the crane and getting in the car and driving off.
Not
abandoning
her, but going off for a burger and fries. And then forgetting her, perhaps, or getting in a wreck.

Always, the boys pulled her up and reeled her back in before the thought of abandonment came, and the thought beyond that—the terror of utter loneliness, utter emptiness.

None of them questioned that the crane was there for them, a relic still operating for them. They didn't question that it was tucked out of the way below a series of dunes and bluffs, away from the prying, curious eyes of man, and didn't question the grace, the luck, that allowed them to run it, day or night, unobserved. They didn't question that the world, the whole world, belonged to them.

There were still a million, or maybe a hundred thousand, or at least ten thousand such places left in the world back then. Soft seams of possibility, places where no boundaries had been claimed—places where reservoirs of infinite potential lay exposed and waiting for the claimant, the discoverer, the laborer, the imaginer. Places of richness and health, even in the midst of heart-rotting, gut-eating poisons.

For the first time, however, Richard and Kirby began to view each other as competitors. It was never a thought that lasted; always, they were ashamed of it and able to banish it at will: but for the first time, it was there.

 

The egret fell to pieces slowly. Sun-baked, rained-upon, wind-ruffled, ant-eaten, it deflated as if only now was its life leaving it; and then it disintegrated further until soon there were only piles of sun-bleached feathers lying in the cracks and crevices of the junk-slag island below, and feathers loose, too, within the ghost frame of its own skeleton, still up there at the top of the machines.

As the egret decomposed, so too was revealed the quarry within—the last meal upon which it had gorged—and they could see within the bone basket of its rib cage all the tiny fish skeletons, with their piles of scale glitter lying around like bright sand. There were bumps and tumors, misshapen bends in the fishes' skeletons, and as they rotted (flies feasting on them within that ventilated rib cage, as if trapped in a bottle, but free, also, to come and go) the toxic sludge of their lives melted to leave a bright metallic residue on the island, staining here and there like stripes of silver paint.

 

Sometimes they would be too restless to fool with even the magnificence of the crane. Bored with the familiar, the three of them would walk down the abandoned railroad tracks, gathering plump late-season dewberries, blackening their hands with the juice until they looked as if they had been working with oil. Kirby or Richard would take off his shirt and make a sling out of it in which to gather the berries. Their mouths, their lips, would be black-ringed, like clowns'.

She beheld their bodies. They filled her dreams—first one boy, then the other—as did dreams of ghost ships, and underworld rides. Dreams of a world surely different from this one—a fleshing, a stripping back to reveal the bones and flesh, the red muscle of a world not at all like the image of the one we believe we have crafted above.