The Lives of Rocks by Rick Bass Page B

They called from pay phones, and when they got the answering machine, they would tell him to check with Sue at the hospital, that there’d been an accident involving one of the boys.
    He had been wrong, but they were more wrong. They were guerrilla tactics, brutal and nasty, and I did not blame Vern for wanting to get out early. I opened his beers for him, handed them to him, got the whiskey for him out of the freezer. I’d always heard that a weak man can stand any kind of pain except another’s. I didn’t know if I was being weak. It was the only thing I knew to do. Reason had long ago left
Ann and would never return; and Vern’s strength, and courage, had finally been worn down.
    There was only my godchild, Wejumpka, left.
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    We drove into the garage after dark, wearing dark clothes, sometimes already drunk, and pulled the garage door down and made sure all the curtains were drawn before turning on any lights inside. We always kept one man at the window upstairs in a room with the lights turned off, to keep an eye on his house. It was usually Vern up there.
    I’d be down in the kitchen fixing supper, or fixing drinks, and he’d be sitting backwards on a chair, resting over it like a riverboat captain, watching his old house with expensive field glasses, the kind hunters use right at dusk for drawing in as much of the failing light as possible—and he’d call out in a loud voice what all was going on, a radio announcer giving the play-by-play.
    If Ann was in the kitchen he could see her, and he’d call out what she was cooking, what she was nibbling on—“She’s feeding her fat face with
croutons
” he’d howl; “She’s just eating the croutons out of the box with her paw, like a
primate!
” he’d roar, sometimes falling backwards, and I’d have to rush up to see if he was all right, to clean up the beer he’d spilled and to hand him another—but other times he would fall silent, and downstairs, hearing the silence, I’d know that he must have the binoculars trained on the boys, if Austin was home: that perhaps they were lying on the rug in the den in front of the television, or maybe simply even doing their homework.
    One time I brought drinks upstairs, Long Island iced teas in tall glasses, with another gallon of reserves in a pitcher, and some nachos, only to find him weeping, still watching
the house across the street through the field glasses, but with tears rolling down his cheeks and shoulders shaking.
    The curtains were open across the street, and in the yellow square of light in Ann’s living room we could see Austin trying to teach Wejumpka how to dance to some song we could not hear.
    We could only watch, as if they were an old silent film, while Austin, with his raggedy blue-jean jacket and old Le-vis, his long woman’s hair and earrings, shut his eyes and boogied madly, running in place, it seemed, throwing his arms up in the air and shaking them in a free, mad glee, and then stopping, suddenly, standing behind Wejumpka, lifting Wejumpka’s arms, trying to show Wejumpka how it was done, growing exasperated, then, when Wejumpka did not get the hang of it. Austin stepped in front of Wejumpka once more and began dancing again, writhing and jumping, leaping, doubtless to one of Vern’s old records that Ann had confiscated. All the old good ones were in there. It was probably Bob Seger, I thought, but said nothing, and pulled the shades so Vern wouldn’t have to watch any longer.
    We noticed that Ann was having to turn sideways to get through doorways. She was Vern’s and my height, five foot eight or so, and had been a pretty plump 160 pounds at the wedding, and 185 soon thereafter; during the months preceding the divorce, Vern said, she had weighed in at around 240, and now, almost three years later, she had to be tipping them at close to 300 and was showing no signs of slowing