Free The Lives of Rocks by Rick Bass Page A

house, and the one across the street, slid swamp-ward, riding on the slick Yazoo clay.

The Canoeists
    The two of them would go canoeing on any of the many winding creeks and rivers that braided their way through the woods and gentle hills to the north. They would drive north in Bone’s old truck and put the boat on the Brazos, or the Colorado, or White Oak Creek, or even the faster-running green waters of the Guadalupe, without a care of where they might end up, and would explore those unknown seams of water and bright August light with no maps, knowing only what lay right before them as they rounded each bend.
    They would take wine, and a picnic lunch, and fishing tackle, and a lantern. They drifted beneath high chalky bluffs, beneath old bridges, and past country yards where children playing tag on the hillsides among trees above the river stopped to watch them pass. They paddled on, Bone shirtless in the stern and Sissy straw-hatted in the bow,
the in her swimsuit. When they reached sun-scrubbed bars of white sand next to deep, dark pools, around the bend from any town or road, shaded by towering oaks, they would beach the canoe and lie on blankets in the sun like basking turtles, sweating nude, glistening, drinking wine and getting up every now and again to run down to the river and dive in, to cleanse the suntan oil and grit of sand and shine of sex from their bodies.
    Hot breezes would dry their bodies quickly again, once they returned to the blankets. Their damp hair would keep them cool for a little while. They would lie perfectly still on their backs, looking up at the sun, hands clasped, and listen to the shouts, the sawing buzz, of the seventeen-year locusts going insane back in the forest, choking on the heat.
    Later, when the day had cooled slightly—when the tops of the trees were beginning to catch and block some of the sun’s direct rays—they would climb back into the green canoe and drift farther downstream, unconcerned by the notions or constraints of time and the amount of water that had passed by. If anything, they felt nourished and enriched by it.
    They would paddle on into dusk, and then into the night, falling deeper in love, and speaking even less, as night fell; paddling with the lantern lit and balanced on the bow, with moths following them—they had no idea where they were—while Bone would cast to fish, sometimes catching one slash-silver fighting and leaping just outside the glow cast by the lantern’s ring of light.
    Fireflies would line the banks, illuminating the route they should take—the fireflies would not venture over water, so the darkness of their absence was a winding lane for them—
and they passed too occasionally the bright window-square blazons of farmhouses, of families tucked in for the night, also lining both edges of the shore.
    When they came to a lonely bridge or railroad trestle, they would finally relinquish the day, or that part of it, to the river, and eddy out to the bank, where Sissy would climb out with the lantern and Bone would pass her the equipment, and then he would climb out and shoulder the canoe like some shell-bound brute, and they would pick their way up the slope, clambering through brush and litter tossed from decades of the bridge’s passersby, ascending to the road and firm level ground while the river below kept running past.
    Owls would be hooting, and heat lightning, like a pulse or an echo from the day’s troubles—or like a price that must be paid for the day’s bliss—would be shuddering in distant sky-flash in all directions, though it seemed like no price or debt or accounting to Bone and Sissy, only more blessing, as the breezes from the far-off thunderstorms stirred and cooled them as they walked through cricket-song and darkness, save for those glimmers of lightning and the fireflies that dotted the meadows and swarmed around the couple as if accompanying them. They might be five miles