The Lives of Rocks (20 page)

She swung her feet off the bed and stood unsteadily, and watched us with unblinking raptness.

“Let's go look at the stock,” Sloat said, and we could tell that it gave him pleasure to say the word
stock.

The three of us went through the cluttered kitchen and out to the backyard—it surprised me that there were no dogs or cats in the house—and the girl followed us to the door but no farther, and stood there, on the other side of the screen. Her bare feet, I had noticed, were dirty, as if she had made the journey out to the stables before, but on this occasion lingered behind, perhaps made shy.

Sloat was wearing old sharp-toed cowboy boots, his thin shanks shoved into them in such a way that I knew he wasn't wearing socks, and he walked in a brisk, almost fierce line straight through the puddles and troughs toward the stables, as if he enjoyed splashing through the muck and grime, while Moxley and I pussyfooted from little hummock to hummock, sometimes slipping and dipping a foot in one water-filled rut or another. Whitish foam floated on the top of many of the puddles, as if someone, or something, had been urinating in them.

Sloat pushed through a rickety one-hinge gate, and goats, chickens, and other fleeting, unidentified animals scattered before his explosive entrance. Sloat began cursing and shouting at them, then picked up a stick and rat-tat-tatted it along the pickets to excite them further, like a small boy, and as if to demonstrate their vigor to their potential buyers.

A pig, a pony, a rooster. A calf, or something that looked like a calf, except for its huge head, which was so out of
proportion for the tiny body that it seemed more like the head of an elephant.

“I buy them from the Feist brothers,” he said. “The ones that don't get sold at auction. They give me a special deal,” he said.

The animals continued to bleat and caterwaul, flowing away, flinging themselves against the fences. Some of them ran in demented circles, and others tried to burrow in the mud, while the goats, the most nimble of them, leapt to the tops of the little crude-hammered, straw-lined doghouses and peered down with their wildly disconcerting vertical-slit lantern green eyes as if welcoming Moxley and me into some new and alien fraternity of half man, half animal: and as if, now that Moxley and I were inside the corral, the goats had us exactly where they wanted us.

Moxley had eyes only for the calves, thin-ribbed though they were, dehydrated and listless, almost sleepwalkerish compared to the frenzy and exodus of the other animals. Six of them were huddled over in one corner of the makeshift corral, quivering collectively, their stringy tails and flanks crusted green.

“Which are the fifteen-dollar ones?” he asked, and, sensing weakness, Sloat replied, “Those are all gone now. The only ones I have left are thirty-five.”

Moxley paused. “What about that little Brahma?” he asked, pointing to the one animal that was clearly superior, perhaps even still healthy.

“Oh, that's my little prize bull,” Sloat said. “I couldn't let you have him for less than seventy-five.”

Between us, we had only sixty-five, which in the end turned out to be precisely enough. We had no trailer attached to the back of the station wagon, but Sloat showed us
how we could pull out the back seat, lash the seat to the roof for the drive home, and line the floor and walls of the station wagon with squares of cardboard, in case the calf soiled it, and drive home with him in that manner. “I've done it many a time myself,” Sloat said.

The girl had come out to watch us, had waded barefoot through the same puddles in which her father, or whatever his relation was to her, had waded. She now stood on the other side of the gate, still wearing her nightgown, and watched us as Sloat and Moxley and I, our financial transaction completed, chased the bull calf around the corral, slipping in the muck, Sloat swatting the calf hard with a splintered baseball bat, whacking it whenever he could, and Moxley and me trying to tackle the calf and wrestle it to the ground.

The calf was three times as strong as any one of us, however, and time and again no sooner had one of us gotten a headlock on it than it would run into the side of the corral, smashing the would-be tackler hard against the wall; and soon both Moxley and I were bleeding from our shins, noses, and foreheads, and I had a split lip—and still Sloat kept circling the corral, following the terrified calf, smacking him hard with the baseball bat.

Somehow, all the other creatures had disappeared—had vanished into other, adjacent corrals, or perhaps through a maze of secret passageways—and, leaning against one of the wobbly slat walls, blood dripping from my nose, I saw now what Sloat had been doing with his wild tirade: that each time the calf rounded a corner, Sloat had pushed open another gap or gate and ushered two or three more nontarget animals into one of the outlying pens, until finally the calf was isolated.

Sloat was winded, and he stood there gasping and sucking air, the bat held loosely in his hands. The calf stood facing the three of us, panting likewise, and suddenly Sloat rushed him, seemingly having waited to gauge when the animal would be midbreath, too startled or tired to bolt, and he struck the calf as hard as he could with the baseball bat, striking it on the bony plate of its forehead.

The calf neither buckled nor wobbled, but seemed only to sag a little, as if for a long time he had been tense or worried about something but could now finally relax.

Sloat hit the calf again quickly, and then a third and fourth time, striking it now like a man trying to hammer a wooden stake into the ground, and that was how the calf sank, shutting its eyes and folding, sinking lower; and still Sloat kept striking it as if he intended to punish it or kill it, or both.

He did not stop until the calf was unconscious, or perhaps dead, and lying on its side. Then he laid his bat down almost tenderly—as if it were some valuable instrument to be accorded great respect.

The Goat Girl watched as if she had seen it all before. Sloat paused to catch his breath and then called to us to help him heft the calf quickly, before it came back to consciousness, though we could not imagine such a thing, and I was thinking at first that he had just stolen our money: had taken our sixty-five dollars, killed our calf, and was now demanding our assistance in burying it.

The Goat Girl roused herself finally, and she splashed through the puddles of foam and slime, out toward the car in advance of us, as if intending to lay palm fronds before our approach, and she opened our car door and placed the scraps of cardboard in the car's interior, for when the calf resurrected.

“How long will he be out?” Moxley asked.

“Where are you taking him?” Sloat asked, and I told him,
West Houston
—about an hour and a half away.

“An hour and a half,” said Sloat, whom I had now begun to think of as the Goat Man. He shook our proffered hands—cattlemen!—and told us, as we were driving off, to come back soon, that he had a lot of volume coming through, and that he would keep an eye out for good stock, for buyers as discerning as we were, and that he would probably be able to give us a better break next time.

Moxley slithered the station wagon out to the end of the drive—the Goat Man and Goat Girl followed—and Moxley stopped and rolled his window down and thanked them both again and asked the girl what her name was.

But she had fallen into a reverie and was staring at us in much the same manner as the calf had after receiving his first blow; and as we drove away she did not raise her hand to return our waves, and neither did she give any other sign of having seen or heard us, or that she was aware of our existence in the world.

Driving away, I was troubled deeply by the ragtag, slovenly, almost calculated half-assedness of the operation; and on the drive home, though Moxley and I for the most part were pleased and excited about having gotten another calf, and so cheaply, I was discomforted, could feel a rumbling confusion, the protest that sometimes precedes revolution though other times leads to nothing, only acquiescence, then senescence. I could see that Moxley did not feel it—and, sensing this, I felt weaker, and slightly alone.

 

The calf woke up when we were still an hour from Ben's ranch. The calf did not awaken gradually, as a human might,
stirring and blinking and looking around to ascertain his new surroundings, but awoke instead explosively, denting a crumple in the roof immediately with his bony head. He squealed and then began crashing against the sides of the car's interior so violently, and with such a clacking of hoofs, that we were afraid he would break the glass and escape; and his frenzied thrashings (he was unable to stand to his full height in the back of the car, and instead began crawling) reminded me of how, hours earlier, the calf had been rounding the makeshift corral.

We attempted to shoo the calf to the back, swatting at him with our hands, but these gestures held no more meaning for the bull than if we had been waving flyswatters at him, and his squeals transformed to full roars, amplified to terrifying proportions within the confines of the car. At one point he was in the front seat with us, having lunged over it, and in his flailings managed to head-butt me, and he cut Moxley's shins so deeply with swift kicks of his sharp little hoofs that they were bruised and bleeding, and he nearly ran off the road—but then the calf decided it preferred the space and relative freedom of the back seat and vaulted back over the seat again and into its cardboard lair, where it continued to hurl itself against the walls.

As the Goat Man had foreseen, and as a symptom of the ailment that had caused it to not be bid upon in the first place at the regular auction—the auction that had preceded the mysterious Feist brothers' obtaining him—the calf in its fright began emitting fountains of greenish, watery diarrhea, spraying it midwhirl as if from a hose, so that we were yelling and ducking, and soon the interior of the car was nearly coated with dripping green slime. And though panicked, we were fierce in our determination to see this thing
through, and we knew that if we stopped and turned the calf out into the open, we would never capture it again.

Somehow we made it home, and in the darkness of the new evening, with fireflies blinking in the fields, we drove straight out into Old Ben's pasture, ghostly gray weeds scraping and scratching against the sides of the wagon with an eerie, clawing keen that further terrified the calf: and when we rolled down the tailgate's window he leapt out into that clean sweet fresh night air; and this calf, too, we never saw again, though the residue of his journey, his passage, remained with us for weeks afterward, in cracks and crevices of the old station wagon, despite our best scrubbing.

 

Old Ben fell further into the rot. Moxley and I could both see it, in his increasing lapses of memory, and his increasingly erratic behavior; and though I had perceived Moxley to be somehow more mature than I—more confident in the world—I was surprised by how vulnerable Moxley seemed to be made by Ben's fading.

Ben was ancient, a papery husk of a man—dusty, tottering history, having already far exceeded the odds by having lived as long as he had—and was going downhill fast. Such descent could not be pleasant for Old Ben, who, after all, had once been a young man much like ourselves. His quality of life was plummeting even as ours, fueled by the strength of our youth, was ascending. Did Moxley really expect, or even want, for the old man to hang on forever, an eternal hostage to his failed and failing body, just so Moxley would have the luxury of having an older surviving family member?

We couldn't keep him locked up all the time. Moxley had taken over control of the car completely, took it to school each day, and hid the keys whenever he was home, but Old
Ben's will was every bit as fierce as Moxley's, and Ben continued to escape. We often found him floating in the stock tank, using an inner tube for a life vest, fishing, with no hook tied to his line, flailing at the water determinedly.

He disappeared for a week once after rummaging through the drawers and finding the key to the tractor, which he drove away, blowing a hole through the back wall of the barn. We didn't notice the hole, or that the tractor was missing, and it was not until a sheriff called from Raton County, New Mexico, asking if Moxley knew an elderly gentleman named Ben, before we had any clue of where he was. We skipped school and drove out there to get him, pulling a rented flatbed on which to strap the tractor, and he was as glad to see us as a child would have been; and Moxley, in his relief, was like a child himself, his eyes tearing with joy.

 

All through that winter we continued to buy more stock from the Goat Man, knowing better but unable to help ourselves, and lured, too, by the low prices. Even if one in ten of his scour-ridden wastrels survived to market, we would come out ahead, we told ourselves, but none of them did: they all escaped through our failed fence, usually in the very first afternoon of their freedom, and we never saw any of them again.

We imagined their various fates. We envisioned certain of them being carried away by the panthers that were rumored to still slink through the Brazos river bottoms, and the black jaguars that were reported to have come up from Mexico, following those same creeks and rivers as if summoned, to snack on our cheap and ill-begotten calves, or
calves,
as we called them. We imagined immense gargoyles and winged harpies that swooped down to snatch up our renegade
runaway crops. We envisioned modern-day cattle rustlers congregating around the perimeter of our ranch like fishermen. It was easy to imagine that even the Goat Man himself followed us home and scooped up each runaway calf in a net, and returned with it then to his lair, where he would sell it a second time to another customer.

Or perhaps there was some hole in the earth, some cavern into which all the calves disappeared, as if sucked there by a monstrous and irresistible force. Any or all of these paranoias might as well have been true, given the completeness of the calves' vanishings.