All the Land to Hold Us

by Rick Bass

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  BOOK ONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  BOOK TWO

  8

  9

  10

  Acknowledgments

  Sample Chapter from NASHVILLE CHROME

  Buy the Book

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2013 by Rick Bass

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-0-547-68712-4

  eISBN 978-0-547-68743-8

  v1.0813

  For Nicole Angeloro

  Prologue

  He was not the first seeker of treasure upon the landscape, was instead but one more in the continuum of a story begun long ago by greater desires than even his own. Richard was a geologist, a prober and a searcher, dedicated to uncovering certain things, though he tended to ignore or obscure others. Even in his youth, he understood he was tiny against the world, his desire burning no more and no less than that of any other traveler who pressed against the world like one great animal swimming by itself in a vast sea, each traveler’s life passing through that sea like the equally brief phosphorescent specter of time or memory that trailed in the traveler’s wake: though always, after that phosphorescence faded, there would be one more traveler.

  There was once, and still is, a place in the West Texas landscape, Castle Gap, that drew travelers toward it as the eye of the needle of heaven is said to draw human souls.

  Castle Gap rises from the greasewood plains as a wall of rimrock formed from limestone deposits in the warm, shallow Permian sea of 270 million years ago. It was through this eroded notch between broad valleys and the desert that all travelers were drawn—Stone Age man, then Comanches and Apaches, Spaniards seeking gold and souls to convert like bullion for the King, and later, white colonists and the cattle drivers and wagon trains that would supply the colonists with their many whims and needs. It was the gate through which they all had to pass, to cross the river, and then the great desert.

  The Gap was a bottleneck on either side of the Pecos River. To scale the vertical cliffs of the mountains would have been next to impossible, fraught with peril for even a lone climber; and certainly neither livestock nor wagons could have made such a sheer ascent. And not only did the Gap attract every traveler, it seemed also to summon every myth, every tale of deprivation or longing, every fear and every desire, from the first moment a traveler’s eyes fell upon it.

  It is said that even today an odd whistling occurs from the cleft in the early evenings as the winds of the day are bent by the landscape’s wishes to moan one and only one song, so that even a traveler blind to the world, or on a blackened night, with his or her back turned to the cleft, might know by that sound the shape of that cleft; and from that shape the knowledge of the stories buried there, stories which had no choice but to pass through.

  The inland salt lake below Castle Gap—Juan Cordona Lake, fifteen miles farther into that westering desert—had for centuries drawn the wandering Paleolithic clans, who sought its salt for both sustenance and trade, and who passed it on their journeys up onto the Edwards Plateau to hunt buffalo. The first known recorded reference to the Gap comes from 1535, when Cabeza de Vaca, lost, wandered inland from the Texas coast.

  De Vaca had had a hard time of it, having been held hostage on the Texas coast by both the Karankawas and, slightly farther inland, the Coahuiltecans, who, not knowing enough yet to kill all white men on sight, instead kept their captives bound with leather in thorn cages, feeding them fish swarming with maggots, and a meal de Vaca would later call indescribable: the “second harvest,” a collection of partially digested nuts and grains gleaned from the remnants of human feces.

  De Vaca—not the last dreamer of glory upon that landscape—had taken to using his mother’s name, which implied higher social standing. He survived his first exploration of the area, and eventually returned to Spain, where once back in the court of the King, he did not dwell on the hardships, but instead told the Spanish Viceroy, Viceroy Mendoza, that although he had not exactly seen gold, antimony, or iron, he had glimpsed signs and clues of such, and had been told of great cities and civilizations farther west.

  Maps and dreams: as if in evidence that all that he dared to dream or believe was true, de Vaca gave Viceroy Mendoza a map he had stopped long enough to sketch of the unmistakable landmark of Castle Gap, beyond the sharp bend of the Pecos River, and the deep-water crossing into Castle Gap, known later as Horsehead Crossing, named for the skulls that would wash ashore there.

  The Viceroy dispatched one of his old hands who had marched with Pizarro in Peru—Fray Marcos, who would know gold if he saw it—to further investigate the rumors. And like de Vaca, Fray Marcos came back claiming that he too had at long last sighted one of the fabled cities of Cíbola, repository of an entire continent’s gold and silver, though he had not quite had time to enter the city, and instead viewed it only from a great distance.

  Before turning around and heading back to Spain, however, Fray Marcos had built a cairn of stones and cried out to the western wilderness, claiming it for the possession of Spain as far as the eye could see, as well as any kingdoms beyond, in the name of God, King Charles V, and Viceroy Mendoza.

  Another expedition was planned. Francisco Coronado, only thirty years old, was chosen to lead this exploration, provided that he match Mendoza’s funds with his own, which Coronado did, after looting his wealthy wife’s estate.

  Hence five years after de Vaca’s crude map, Coronado too wandered beneath the stone gateway of Castle Gap, searching for Cíbola (which proved to be nothing more than a rock pueblo of the Zuñi tribe, sun-glinting in the distance; in disgust and frustration, Coronado and his men killed some of the Zuñis).

  They staggered farther then, lost—to Kansas, to the Grand Canyon, to Mexico, to Louisiana—a great fevered wandering that was fueled by the fabrications of their guide, El Turco, as he whispered intimations of gold just over the next rise, gold just around the next river-bend—though finally Coronado’s army gave up their dreams and began pining solely for water.

  They killed more Indians. They captured some two hundred Puebloans, planning to burn them at the stake. As the captives approached these stakes, however, they broke and ran, and were cut down by rifle fire and swords. In the end the Spaniards were able to burn only about thirty of their captives successfully, with the captives’ women and children witnessing the torture, and after the burning was done, Coronado embraced his lieutenant heartily.

  Coronado finally understood that there was no gold and had El Turco garroted, somewhere in North Texas or Oklahoma—the journals are barely legible—but the garroting occurred somewhere over the vast underground lake of the Ogallala Reservoir, that sweet and seemingly eternal fountain which supplied all of the plains with their astounding bounty; and El Turco’s scheming blood filtered down through those loose sands, draining away in micrograms to be spread throughout the underground veins of the earth, resurfacing here and there, in no pattern that we the living might discern, but always, eventually, resurfacing.

  BOOK ONE

  1

  1966

  FOR MONTHS AFTER Richard first visited Horsehead Crossing—he had been sent by his employer in Hous
ton to explore the largely worked-over oil and gas deposits in the Permian Basin near Odessa—he would dream nightly of what he had seen: the salt-preserved skulls of thousands of horses and cows tipped up in the saline banks of the Pecos, and in the surrounding, shifting sand dunes—horse and cattle skulls trapped in the sand and silt like the pale fossils of the limestone cliffs above.

  Richard would awaken nightly to the dream of being amidst those churning horses, fighting the river’s fierce current, trying to make the crossing at the only possible spot for a hundred miles in either direction. He would dream also of trying to push the maddened cattle across, their legs and horns entangled. In the dream, the herd tipped sideways in the current, thrashing and goring one another and choking on the terrific waves of their own making, the sunlight disappearing beneath the frothing waters, with thousands of pounds of wild horses or cattle riding atop the backs of others, pushing the others down deeper.

  Then the chain of animals would begin to break into tatters, like an ice floe swirling in loosening fragments downstream, with most of the cattle or horses drowned now, drifting into eddies along the banks, where later that night, after a good day’s heat, they would begin to swell, and would line the night-dark shores like the whitened bellies of so many dead fish.

  Too often, in the dream, Richard would find himself beneath the darkened mass of animals in the river crossing, surging with the other animals, trying to find air and sunlight but unable to. Though other times an opening would appear, and he would move quickly up to that clearing of light, would get his head above the water, and would survive; and he would know with exquisite, shining relief the feeling of his hand clutching the far and stony shore. He would pull himself out, drenched and battered, back out onto the land, safely across, along with the rest of the herd, or what remained of it.

  There were human bones all up and down the Pecos too, and back among the sand hills. The sand dunes flowed and shifted with the unpredictable movement of a creature pacing across the land, towering dunes of white sand appearing one morning outside an unfortunate homesteader’s window, where none had existed for fifty years before.

  Richard had never found an entire human skull out in the dunes, but had found pieces of skull, and arrowheads too, and broken arms and bones of his fellow kind. He carried some of the loose bones back to the drilling rig where he had been working at the time. He did not protest when some of the older roughnecks entertained themselves by building a small log-cabin structure out of the bones, which was disassembled later that night by the workers’ dogs, who scattered the bones and clacked on them steadily for the next several days; and for days beyond that, the desert was littered with the scat and offal of the dogs, in which the white cracked pieces of human bone were discernible, like nuts or seeds undigested.

  Once atop the desert, on the stone reef overlooking the flatlands below, Richard would find in his wanderings the prehistoric grinding basins, as deep and circular as if cut with posthole diggers, where people had sat across the centuries, grinding roots and nuts at bluff’s edge while staring out at the depths and the void beyond.

  It seemed to Richard then, even in the midst of his careless youth, that he could feel their presence, thick and dense along the cliff’s walls, still seated around those empty grinding basins—as if the grinders had stepped away for only a moment, or as if they might be returning, having merely not yet shown up for that day’s waiting work—and he moved carefully around the holes, careful not to bump into any of the ghosts, which seemed to him to be everywhere.

  Something about being up there on top of the fossiled reef, so much closer to the sky, and with all of West Texas spread beyond—something about the dryness of the heat, and whiteness of the limestone caprock on which he walked, and the pale blue of the sky above—made him crave sex even more than the general background steadiness of his youth demanded; and sometimes he would bring girlfriends out to Castle Gap, to stare out at that horizon, and to spend the night, to bear witness to the sunset, and the stars that night, beside the windy campfire, and to the sunrise the next morning, and to the glories of each other’s bodies in the warmth of the next day.

  Other times, however, alone, he would wander the shifting, swirling dunes below, with the fortress wall of the reef above like some outpost sentinel or surveyor.

  Strangely enough, there was water out in the dunes—remnant fresh water from millions of years ago, both trapped and transported in mysterious unmappable lenses of sand that changed nightly, daily, beneath the hot scouring breath of the wind.

  Richard had occasionally come across such sparkling water. There would almost always be colorful songbirds gathered around these brief blue puddles, and surprised by Richard’s approach, the birds would leap away on a whirring of wings, water splashing from their wetted beaks and feet and wingtips, differentiating for him the mirage ponds from the real ones—and always, in such moments, Richard would be reminded, with longing, of kisses.

  He would crouch at the water and drink from the little pond like an animal, drinking as much of the ancient water as he could hold, and then he would travel on; and by the next day, the pond would have vanished.

  Sometimes, while walking through the dunes, he would see flocks of small colorful birds go flying past—scarlet tanagers, golden warblers, vermilion flycatchers, all flying together—and he would hurry over the dunes, following the direction they had flown. But he had never been able to find water in this manner, and had instead encountered the brief ponds only and always by stumbling chance, like a sleepwalker in a dream awakening to find him- or herself standing ankle-deep in a river.

  His company’s drilling rigs pushed deeper into the desert, seemingly scattered here and there, but located according to some master plan of the drillers and geologists, who pursued the deepest reservoirs of oil and gas, probing around the edges; seeking the center always, but with their misses defining the rough perimeters.

  Every well drilled brought both mystery and knowledge. A dry hole could be as valuable as a producing well, in that it would help define the limits of the field, and would point the geologists in their next direction.

  Between wells, and during bit trips and circulations for washouts, Richard continued to hike the reef country above, and the dunes below. Down in the dunes, on three separate occasions he found old wagon wheels. Two appeared to be the remnants of failed crossings—the bent wooden staves that housed the iron rim were still intact, sand-pitted and varnished by both time and the flow of the dunes (as if, just beneath the crests of the dunes, the wagon had still been traveling); but the third wheel was charred: not burned completely, as it might have been had it been damaged and used for firewood, but burned only in a three-quarter arc, which suggested to Richard that the wagon train had been set aflame while still standing upright in the sand: the echo of one of the ritual massacres that took place regularly beneath the notched visage of the Gap.

  The landscape gathered all men, across the ages, as the anguished, hungry, confused blood of man surged this way and that, sloshing around in the soft human vessels as if such blood no more belonged in them than a flock of wild birds, bright birds, would belong in a rusting wire cage.

  During his crumbling reign, Maximilian, the Austrian ex-archduke who served as emperor of Mexico from 1864 to 1867, reportedly sent wagon trains northward with all his family’s treasure. Maximilian was eventually placed before a firing squad in the spring of 1867, where, before being blindfolded, he handed each of his executioners a single gold coin; but the rest of his immense wealth had vanished, and the stories surrounding its disappearance, and its eventual burial at Castle Gap, carry at least as much authenticity of detail, and faintly corroborative evidence, as any of the other stories of treasure.

  There is always an escapee. The gold is placed in a cave and sealed with a charge of dynamite; Indians thereafter massacre all but one survivor, a Negro slave who eludes capture by submerging in the river and breathing through a straw or reed. He returns to the
scene in the night, unearths one of the locked strongboxes, smashes it down on a boulder, and a shower of gold and silver coins cascades onto the ground.

  He scoops up a few, caches the strongbox, and heads north, where he is captured, charged with murder, and taken to prison. After seven years of saying he knows where the treasure is, he returns with his jailers, traveling all the way down from Ohio, to show them the cache in exchange for his freedom. When they arrive, however, the cache is gone; and rooting in the dust and gravel, all he is able to produce are a few individual coins, entirely unsatisfactory to his captors, and he is returned to jail.

  Or the survivor is a one-hundred-year-old woman who had been but a child on the runaway priests’ expedition, the Catholic Cross Cache. In the 1870s, near the end of the old woman’s life, she returns by burro to Castle Gap with her two great-grandchildren, one of whom is ten-year-old Susie, who in the 1900s will go on to become Cat-House Susie, an ex-madam servicing oilfield patrons in the region.

  According to Cat-House Susie, her great-grandmother left her and her sister playing in camp and rode the burro up to the summit, and then returned, assuring her great-granddaughters that the treasure was still there, that it had not been disturbed.

  Or an old barfly, for the price of a drink, will produce a gold nugget and a tattered map, and the story of having been privy to the deathbed conversation of an outlaw or a priest; and the next day, when the treasure seeker goes out to the mountain (sweat already streaming down his back, not so much from the warmth of sunrise as from the heated palpitations within), he will find a veritable minefield of previously dug holes and cairns and freshly blazed trees, and false graves in which, upon being excavated, no bones are to be found—though no treasure either.