The Lives of Rocks (21 page)

With each purchase we made I felt more certain that we were traveling down a wrong path, and yet we found ourselves returning to the Goat Man's hovel again and again, and giving him more and more money.

We ferried our stock in U-Haul trailers, and across the months, as we purchased more cowflesh from the Goat Man—meat vanishing into the ether again and again, as if into some quarkish void—we became familiar enough with Sloat and his daughter to learn that her name was Flozelle, and to visit with them about matters other than stock.

We would linger in that center room—bedroom, dining room, living room, all—and talk briefly, first about the weather and then about the Houston Oilers, before venturing out into what Moxley and I had taken to calling the Pissyard. We learned that Flozelle's mother had died when she was born, that Flozelle had no brothers or sisters, and that Sloat loathed schools.

“I homeschool her,” he said. “Go ahead, ask her anything.”

We could have been wiseasses. We could have flaunted our ridiculously little knowledge—the names of signatories to various historical documents, the critical dates of various
armistices—but in the presence of such abject filth, and before her shell-shocked quietude, we were uncharacteristically humbled. Instead, Moxley asked, almost gently, “How long have you had that fish?” and before Flozelle could answer, Sloat bullshitted us by telling us that the fish had been given to his grandmother on her wedding day, almost a hundred years ago.

“What's its name?” I asked, and this time, before Sloat could reply, Flozelle answered.

“Goldy,” she said proudly, and a shiver ran down my back. If I had known what sadness or loneliness really felt like, I think I might have recognized it as such; but as it was, I felt only a shiver, and then felt it again as she climbed up onto the unmade bed (the bottoms of her bare feet unwashed and bearing little crumb fragments) and unscrewed the lid to a jar of uncooked oatmeal she kept beside the bowl, and sprinkled a few flakes into the viscous water.

Moxley was watching her with what seemed to me to be a troubled look, and after she had finished feeding the bloated fish, she turned and climbed back down off the lumpen bed, and then we filed out through the kitchen and on out into the Pissyard to go look at, and purchase, more stock.

 

Back before Ben had begun falling to pieces, Moxley and I had sometimes gone by my house after school to do homework and hang out. My mother would make cookies, and if Moxley was still there when my father got home from work, Moxley would occasionally have supper with us. But those days had gone by long ago, Ben now requiring almost all of his waking care. I helped as I could, doing little things like cleaning up the house. Whenever Ben discovered that he was trapped he would ransack the house, pulling books
down off shelves and hurling his clothes out of his drawer; once he rolled up the carpet and tried to set the end of it on fire, as if lighting a giant cigar: when we arrived at the farmhouse, we could see the toxic gray smoke seeping from the windows, and, rushing inside, we found Ben passed out next to the rug, which had smoldered and burned a big hole in the plywood flooring, revealing the gaping maw of dark basement below, with the perimeter of that burned-out crater circular, like a caldera, having burned so close to Ben that his left arm hung down into the pit. All the next day we hammered and sawed new sheets of plywood to patch that abyss. For a few days afterward, Ben seemed contrite and neither misbehaved nor otherwise suffered any departures from sentience, as if such lapses had been, after all, at least partially willful.

I helped cook dinners, and some nights I stayed over at their farmhouse and helped make breakfast, and helped Moxley batten down the doors and windows before leaving for school. Knives, scissors, matches, guns, fishhooks, lighter fluid, gasoline, household cleaners—it all had to be put away. Moxley had tied a 150-foot length of rope around Ben's waist each night so that if Ben awoke and went sleepwalking, wandering the dewy hills, he could be tracked and reeled in like a marlin or other sport fish.

The farmhouse was a pleasant place to awaken in the morning—the coppery sun rising just above the tops of the trees, and the ungrazed fields lush and tall and green, with mourning doves cooing and pecking red grit and gravel from the driveway—and the interior of the house would be spangled with the prisms of light from all the little pieces of glass arrayed on the windowsill, Ben's shrapnel collection. The spectral casts of rainbow would be splashed all over the
walls, like the light that passes through stained-glass windows, and there would be no sound but the ticking of the grandfather clock in the front hallway, and the cooing of those doves, and the lowing of distant cows not ours. Moxley and I would fix breakfast, gather our homework, then lock up the house and leave, hurrying toward school.

 

I had some money from mowing lawns, and Moxley was pretty flush, or so it seemed to us, from Ben's pension checks. As much from habit now as from desire, we made further pilgrimages to Sloat's corrals that winter and spring.

And following each purchase, upon our return to Ben's ranch, sometimes our new crop of sickly calves would remain in the pasture for a few days, though never longer than a week, after which, always, they disappeared, carrying with them their daunting and damnable genes, the strange double-crossed combination of recessive alleles that had caused the strangeness to blossom in them in the first place—the abnormality, the weakness, that had led to the unfortunate chain of circumstances that resulted in their passing from a real auction to the Feist brothers, who would sell them for dog meat if they could, and then to Sloat and a short life of squalor, and then to us, and then to whatever freedom or destiny awaited them.

Ben caught pneumonia after one of his escapes. (He had broken out a window and crawled through, leaving a trail of blood as well as new glass scattered amid his sparkling windowsill shards of glass from fifty years earlier; we trailed him down to the pond, his favorite resting spot, where he stood shivering, waist deep, as if awaiting a baptism.) Moxley had to check him into the hospital, and after he was gone the silence in the farmhouse was profound.

Moxley was edgy, waiting for the day when Old Ben would be coming home, but that day never came; he would die in the hospital. And although it had long been clear that Ben's days at home were numbered, the abyss of his final absence still came as a surprise, as did Moxley's new anger.

We continued with our old rituals, as if Ben was still with us—cooking the steaks on the back porch grill, and buying cattle—but the ground beneath our feet seemed less firm.

With Old Ben's last pension check Moxley and I went to a real auction and bought a real calf—not one of Sloat's misfits, but a registered Brahma—a stout little bull calf. And rather than risk losing this one, we kept it tethered, like a dog on a leash, in the barn. It was not as wild as Sloat's terrified refugees, and soon we were able to feed and water it by hand: and it grew fatter, week by week. We fed it a diet rich in protein, purchasing sweet alfalfa and pellet cubes. We brushed it and curried it and estimated its weight daily as we fatted it for market. And it seemed to me that with some success having finally been achieved, Moxley's anger and loneliness had stabilized, and I was glad that this calf, at least, had not escaped. It was a strange thought to both of us, to consider that we were raising the animal so someone else could eat him, but that was what cattlemen did.

As this calf, finally, grew fatter, Moxley seemed to grow angry at the Goat Man, and barely spoke to him now when we traveled out there; and though we still went out there with the same, if not greater, frequency, we had stopped purchasing stock from the Goat Man and instead merely went out into the Pissyard to look. After we had purchased the calf from the regular auction, Sloat's offerings were revealed to us in their full haplessness and we could not bring ourselves to take them at any price; still, we went to look, almost
morbidly curious about what misfits might have passed through his gates that week.

 

Moxley asked Flozelle out on what I suppose could be labeled a date, even though I was with them. I wanted to believe the best of him, but it seemed to me that there was a meanness, a bedevilment. Moxley still had the same aspirations—he was intent on going to school and becoming a vet—but the moments of harshness seemed to emerge from him at odd and unpredictable times, like fragments of bone or glass emerging from beneath the thinnest of skin.

The three of us began to ride places together once or twice a week, and, for a while, she fascinated us. She knew how to fix things—how to rebuild a carburetor, how to peel a tire from its rim and plug it with gum and canvas and seat it back onto its rim again—and sometimes, out in the country, we stopped beside the fields of strangers and got out and climbed over the barbed-wire fence and went out to where other people's horses were grazing. We would slip up onto those horses bareback and ride them around strangers' fields for hours at a time. Flozelle knew how to gentle even the most unruly or skittish horse by biting its ears with her teeth and hanging on like a pit bull until Moxley or I had climbed up, and then she'd release her bite hold and we'd rocket across the pasture, the barrel ribs of the horse beneath us heaving; the expensive thoroughbreds of oilmen, the sleek and fatted horses farting wildly from their too rich diets of grain.

She had never been to a movie before, and when we took her she stared rapt, ate three buckets of popcorn, chewing ceaselessly through
Star Wars.
She began spending some afternoons with Moxley out at his farm, and helping him
with chores—mowing with the tractor the unkempt grass, bush-hogging brush and cutting bales of hay for our young bull. She showed us how to castrate him, to make him put on even more weight even faster, and she set about repairing the shabby, sorry fence we had never gotten around to fixing properly.

The calf, the steer, was getting immense, or so it seemed to us, and though he still was friendly and manageable, his strength concerned us. We worried that he might strangle himself on his harness, his leash, should he ever attempt to break out of the barn, and so not long after Flozelle had completed her repairs on the fence we turned him out into the field, unfastening his rope and opening the barn doors, whereupon he emerged slowly, blinking, and then descended to the fresh green fields below and began grazing there confidently, as if he had known all his life that those fields were waiting for him, and that he would reach them in due time.

I had the strange thought that if only Old Ben could have still been alive to see it, the sight might somehow have helped heal him, even though I knew that to be an impossibility. He had been an old man, war torn and at the end of his line; no amount of care, or even miracles, could have kept him from going downhill.

 

To the best of my knowledge, Flozelle did not shower, as if such a practice went against her or her father's religious beliefs. In my parents' car I drove up to the farm one warm day in the spring, unannounced, and surprised Moxley and Flozelle, who were out in the backyard. Moxley was dressed but Flozelle was not, and Moxley was spraying her down with the hose—not in fun, as I might have suspected, but in
a manner strangely more workmanlike, as one might wash a car, or even a horse; and when they saw me Moxley was embarrassed and shut the hose off, though Flozelle was not discomfited at all, and merely took an old towel, little larger than a washcloth, and began drying off.

And later, after he had taken her back home—after we had both driven out to Sloat's and dropped her off, without going inside, and without going back into the Pissyard to look around, I asked him, “Are you sleeping with her?”—and he looked at me with true surprise and then said, “I am,” and when I asked him if she ever spent the night over at the farmhouse, he looked less surprised, less proud, and said yes.

What did it matter to me? It was nothing but an act, almost lavatory-like in nature, I supposed—almost mechanical and without emotion, if not insensate. I imagined it to be for Moxley like the filling of a hole, the shoveling-in of something, and the tamping-down. It was not anything. He was doing what he had to do, almost as if taking care of her; and she, with all the things the Goat Man had taught her, had fixed his fences, had repaired the old tractor, the barn.

She had not led him down any errant path, and neither was his life, or mine, going to change or deviate from our destinies as a result of any choices made or not made. She was like fodder, was all. We were just filling the days. We were still fattening up. We were still strong in the world, and moving forward. I had no call to feel lonely or worried. We still had all the time in the world, the world was still ours, there was no rot anywhere, the day was still fresh and new, we could do no wrong. We would grow, just not now.

My older brother, Sam, was a ladies man. When I was seventeen, he was twenty-two, and during my junior year of high school, to my great initial horror, he began dating my biology teacher, Miss Heathcote, and then, worse yet, fell in love with her, and, worst of all, she fell in love with him. I asked Sam to try to keep it a secret from her that I was his brother, because I was worried that it might make trouble for me in class.

My brother was not right—and though he is better today, has been treated and has also straightened up some, I still fear that a rough road lies ahead of him. But back then he was only beginning to go wrong, to unravel—to feel ungoverned by any laws or constraints.

Sam lived at home, with my parents and me. He had been a fireman for a while but had been let go from the force for “general irresponsibility”; the fire department had believed that he had almost a fetish for danger, for daring.

Sam had wanted to be a policeman after that, but he had a couple of shoplifting convictions, and that was out of the question. I think he would very much have enjoyed being a policeman.