The Lives of Rocks by Rick Bass Page A

his mother, wore earrings, and was, we suspected, asexual.
    But Wejumpka! My godson built model planes, wrote his thank-you notes, hugged everyone he met, and sometimes sat on the back porch with his dog, a big golden retriever named Ossie, and played the harmonica. He was learning to play it well.
    It’s a quiet neighborhood, full of old trees, Spanish moss, everything moving slow. The houses were two and three stories, with their foundations thrown down in what was then forest, built on the treacherous, shifting Yazoo clay formation: slick and red, deceitful, it was beginning to crawl back toward the swamp, toward the Pearl River, trying to take the houses with it.
    A lot of the homes were for sale. There were small panics at the first crack in the driveway, the crack that grew after a rainstorm or a cold spell, sometimes growing so fast that you thought you could see it happening.
    Vern wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near Ann. The judge had barred him from coming within a five-mile radius of
her; he’d given Vern a map of the city of Jackson, showing where he could and could not go. It was simply too much for the city to bear, otherwise. Vern and Ann went at it like cats and dogs, hissing and spitting whenever they came across each other, throwing canned goods at each other, turning one another’s shopping carts over in the grocery store. Vern had sometimes shopped with the red-haired girl who was now gone, which had infuriated Ann to new levels of berserkness—she was a big woman, getting bigger since the divorce, and she’d take her Mace sprayer out of her purse and chase Vern through the grocery store with it, spraying him as if he were a bad dog—and it was just too much for the city to stand.
    But I wasn’t barred from being in the neighborhood, and because so many of the shifting homes were up for sale, some of them were also available for lease and for rent: for anything. Most people just wanted out, any way they could do it. Quitting was imminent.
    To help Vern out and to keep an eye on his boy, and on old Ann, I rented the house across the street; put curtains up, wore a false beard and mustache and wig, walked with a limp and a cane, so she would not know it was me.
    I can’t really stress enough how brutal the divorce was. It took everything they both had, and then from Vern it took a little more.
    Ann got his new unlisted phone number and passed it out to her friends. They would call him at all hours of the night—and always he had to answer, not knowing if it was an emergency involving one of the boys or merely another hate call—but always it was the latter.
    â€œYou’re a dead man, Davidson,” a woman’s husky voice
would whisper, full of hate: maniacal, and full of the holiness of being right. “Dead
meat
” the voice would hiss, and then hang up. And Vern would laugh about it, telling it to me, but he had also half worried about it for a long time—and months later, when the calls finally stopped coming, he had begun to worry even more, as if now they didn’t dare risk threatening him, because they were
serious
now and didn’t want him to be alert.
    He listened to noises in the night for a long time, he said, and wondered how they would do it to him. He couldn’t understand such hatred; he would shake his head, run his hand through his hair, and say, “I just don’t get it. It was only a divorce.”
    I wanted to tell him that it was
not
just a divorce, that it was all these lives, that they were ticking away, lost time, misspent hours, and things ruined, good things—but that was precisely what Ann’s angry friends were telling him, and I was Vern’s pal so I could not do that. I had to try to bolster him, even if with stories, tales and lies, until he was back on his feet again, or until the end. It was a hard job.
    If Vern was out, Ann’s friends would leave messages on his answering machine.