Free The Lives of Rocks by Rick Bass Page B

from their truck, or they might be twenty; how to get there, they would have no idea, but neither would they be worried: Bone would not be due back at work for another twelve hours.
    They would walk down the center of the dark road, Bone toting the canoe over his head like a crucifix, or some huge umbrella, and Sissy walking beside him, feeling love for him as a human but also with the comfortable affection and unspoken communication one has with animals: a dog, a horse, a gentle bull, a cat. And she felt much the same herself—
part human, but part other-animal, as well—and it was, again, the calmest she could ever remember being.
    After a while a vehicle would approach from one direction or another, almost always an old truck in that section of the country, and the driver would give them a ride. They would lash the canoe in belly-side down, as if it were still in the water, and climb up into the cab with the old farmer and ride back north into the night, though other times when there was no rope they would sit in the canoe itself, in the back, slanted skyward, gripping both the canoe’s gunwales and the side of the truck to keep it from sliding out. They would ride seated in the canoe, wind rushing past them at forty, fifty miles an hour, and would be unafraid, too deep in love to know anything beyond the beauty of the moment, their hair swirling and the rolls of lightning-wash flashing.
    Sometimes their patron, as he crossed a county line, would want to stop at the neon red of a bar—only a handful of other old trucks parked out in front—and they would climb out of the canoe to go inside with him, to share a beer, and perhaps a sandwich, or ribs. The sides of their green canoe would be smeared with the wind-crushed bodies from the swarms of fireflies they’d driven through, some of them still glowing gold but becoming dimmer, as if cooling, and it made the canoe look special, and pretty, like a float in some parade, and people in the bar would come to the doorway and stare for a moment at it thus decorated, and at Bone and Sissy—as if someone special, or important, or simply charmed had come to visit.
    They would drink a beer, would shoot a game or two of pool, and would visit in the dark bar, listening to the jukebox while the summer storm moved in and thundered across and past, like the nighttime passage of some huge herd of
animals above. And afterward, when they went back out and climbed into their canoe to head on back north, with the driver searching for where they had left their truck, the air would be scrubbed clean and cooler, and steam would be rising from the dark roads, and the smears of fireflies would be washed from their canoe so that all was dark around them again.
    They would find their truck, eventually, and would thank the old driver, and shake his hand, and for the rest of his short days he would remember having given them a ride, as they would likewise remember it for the rest of their long days; and what invisible braid or fabric is formed of such connections, transitory and sprawling across time, across generations? Do they last, invisible, to form a kind of fiber or residue in the world, or are they all eventually washed away, as if cleansed and made nothing again by a summer rainstorm’s passage?
    They would drive home toward the big city with the windows rolled down, listening to the radio. They would unload the canoe when they got to Bone’s house and climb the stairs without bothering to turn on any of the lights. It might be two or three A.M . They would undress and climb into his bed, into the familiar clean sheets—warmer, upstairs—and open the windows for fresh air, and would make love again, both for the pleasure of it as well as to somehow seal or anchor their return home; and at daylight Bone would awaken and shower and dress in his suit, and head to work, leaving Sissy still asleep in his bed, their bed, swirled in white cotton sheets and