All the Land to Hold Us

by Rick Bass

  The seeker will wander the mountain for a day or two or three, digging in the sun and resting in the heat of noonday in the shamble of the adobe hut at the base of the mountain, the hut that once served as a rest station for the stage.

  (It seemed to Richard, when he came to the landscape, that this hut was the only place on the mountain that had not been disturbed by the shovels and pickaxes of man; and if he were going to look for any of the treasure, or treasures, that is where he would have looked. But he didn’t. He had come looking for other treasures, other things.)

  There was one woman in particular with whom he spent time, during the period that he was developing the oilfields in the region. Her name was Clarissa, and she had grown up in Odessa, and hated the oil business—hated the familiarity and sameness of it, as well as the landscape—and though she and Richard were only together for about four months, they were good months, and seemed timeless to the lovers.

  Clarissa’s hair was as black as a Comanche’s, and her eyes were a pale green. She had thick arching eyebrows that could give one who did not know her the impression of perpetual surprise, and flawless, pale skin. Unlike the other girls she had grown up with (whose skin, by the time they were eighteen, already looked like that of forty-year-olds), Clarissa did not endeavor to spend her every sunlit moment in pursuit of bronzing her skin, but labored to keep it the color it was.

  She hated the desert, and loved to soak in water for long stretches—in the bathtub, in the salty rivers, even in warm stock tanks—and she and Richard spent many nights just sitting in the shallows, after having loved; and it seemed to him that her pale body, almost luminous when wet, was a phenomenon in such a harsh country—exceedingly rare, and daily imperiled.

  Clarissa had no goal other than getting out: away from West Texas and away from the oil business, which meant away from any and all of Texas. When Richard met her she was working in Odessa as a receptionist for one of the drilling companies. She could smell the odor of crude oil on the men who came and went through the office as a farmer or rancher can smell the scent of horses or cattle in another’s clothes, or on another’s skin; and lying next to Richard, there in the eddies of the salty, muddy river, she could smell it on him, and could taste it on him, though she forgave him, because she in no way loved him, was interested only in the luminescence she sometimes sensed emanating from him. Her own light was hidden, but his seemed at times to leap from him.

  There was a place inside him she was drawn to. He would not let her into that place, for she did not love him: but she could sometimes see the glow of it from far within; and for those four months, while he was drilling the various fields, she stayed with him.

  The consensus of her high school (she was twenty when Richard met her) and of the community had been that she would go to Hollywood and become an actress or a model. They overestimated her in this regard. She had no desire to work, nor, necessarily, to improve or “better” herself; she wanted only to keep her skin looking the way it did, pale and creamy-soft, night-dreamish, for as long as possible, and to escape the wind and heat.

  She sensed intuitively that her power, her physical beauty, lay in this emotional detachment, and ambition of any kind would have jeopardized and perhaps even marred that trance in which the dreamy mental languor was so tied to the physical.

  As if everything in her sphere was hypnotized: her viewers, her suitors, the innocence of her skin and beauty, and the ravages of time itself; as if she had momentarily betranced even time’s pendulum. So frightened was she of losing her beauty that she lived almost as if in a state of narcolepsy—seeking, as often as possible, not to let the drying winds of the world rest upon her for more than a moment, and moving from one body of water to the next, and bathing, always bathing.

  They spent the nights out near Castle Gap, among the reefs and caverns of the bluff, searching for fossils. It was easier to search for them in the daylight, but Clarissa preferred to be out at night, and so they would walk along the rim with flashlights or lanterns, looking for the most perfect and interesting specimens; chipping them out with rock hammers and collecting them in canvas pouches.

  Richard kept most of these for his own interest, a personal collection to be placed along his windowsills, while Clarissa saved hers to sell to the museums, to help raise enough money to leave Odessa and make another life as soon as she could.

  “This one is over a million years old,” he would tell her, handing her some intricately spiraled snail, “while this one is only about six hundred thousand.” The smell of ancient lime-chalk both fascinated and repelled her—it was the stuff of geology, the stuff of her hometown—and yet neither could she pull away entirely from him, or the fossils.

  They worked in the evenings along the old strand lines, and along the fringed edges of ancient reefs, and then deeper—cracking open vertical seams with rock hammer and crowbar, collecting not just the fossils on the surface, but reaching down into the strata of their predecessors.

  Even then, and about a thing so meaningless as a mild hobby, he always kept maps, and they found fossils no one had ever seen or described before, and after a while he was able to predict where they might be able to find a certain kind of fossil; and after a while longer—beginning to follow the journey of his dream as if riding on a small raft, feeling the water take it and lift it, feeling the current’s center—he was able to predict where they would find certain types of fossils that they had not even seen yet, did not even know existed for sure—hypotheses, musings, based on how a certain sea current, and a certain temperature and water chemistry, might sculpt them: the world shaping them like a potter spinning clay, or a woodworker tending a lathe.

  Like a magician, he would sketch the imagined creatures in a notepad—gone-away beings that were fantastically ornamented, bold, and multiantennaed—and then, a few nights later, and several feet farther down into the crevice, they would find those very forms.

  The impression such discoveries gave both of them was that the world was infinitely varied, and that the ground upon which they walked was studded with a colossus of change below, vertical columns of magnificent fluted architectures and symphonies that no man or woman had ever seen or heard, dreamed or imagined.

  Clarissa’s father, in addition to working in oilfield wireline services, was a Baptist preacher who felt that Clarissa’s beauty was more a curse than a blessing, and who would have been appalled at her wanton engagement with evolution: prowling the reefs and cliffs with the tusks of cephalopods and bivalves and the ribbed shells of trilobites kept safely in a pouch between her breasts, and Clarissa believing more and more deeply, with each swing of the hammer, in some story larger and grander than the same but simpler version on which he had raised her.

  Their work was dirty, climbing among the slot canyons and brushy draws and smashing apart the old lime reefs that were sometimes so riddled with fossils as to seem like the honeycomb of bees. Their bodies would be covered with grit and dust and chalk—newly cracked, freshly broken Cretaceous odors that had not been in the world for several hundred million years—and their arms would be latticed with scratches from where they had reached down into the stony crevices to extract their treasures, as if dissecting the tiniest and most integral gear-works of some huge and calcified machine that had once been the grandest thing on earth.

  They camped down along the river, and would swim back across it—Clarissa was not as strong a swimmer, and used a life jacket—and they would bathe in the eddies. They would ride inner tubes through the rapids, making the long run in the horse-drowning current and then walking back up along the shoreline, picking their way around the salt-encrusted skulls of the last century’s horses.

  Sometimes under the cover of so much darkness it would feel to both of them as if all the sky above had already been transformed into the strata of time—that they were already sealed beneath such a sky, as if below so many trillions of tons of stone—and that at any moment their movements would cease forever and they
would be stranded there with the horses’ heads, caught ankle- or knee-deep in the mire. Like the children they had been not long ago, they would ride the inner tubes down the moon-bright current, the river bright as magma, again and again, until they were both clean and exhausted, or as clean as they could get, bathing in a salt river.

  They would sleep beside the crossing on air mattresses, lulled by the sound of the river. On clear nights, they could hear (and sometimes feel trembling within the earth) the ceaseless throb and clatter of the faraway rigs, as the drillers sought to reach ever deeper, focused on only one thing, and chasing that one thing, the shape of it like the outline of a fleeing animal, hounding it, as if believing like blind converts that that one thing had more significance than any other, and that there was nothing else of comparable worth in the world; or, most blindly of all, that there might truly one day be an end to their searching, and a stanching of their hunger.

  Clarissa rarely slept, there on the air mattress. She would lie awake watching the stars while Richard slept, and she would wait. When she swam she kept her hair up in a bun, to keep the salt in the river from damaging it, and only the hair at the nape of her neck would get damp.

  On the riverbank, she would lie very still, conscious of the need to conserve herself—her energy, and her passions—sensing that if she was to escape Odessa successfully and forever, she would have to do so, despite her great beauty, by somehow staying beneath the world’s, or time’s, notice. To wait, and wait, until a gate or door opened.

  She did not even know what the door looked like, nor certainly to where it led: only that it had not yet opened, and she felt the need to wait, as if sleeping.

  Richard would awaken shortly after dawn, on those mornings when they were able to spend the night out along the river—when his work did not call him back to the oilfields that next day, for one rare reason or another—and Clarissa would already be sitting up, just watching him, a sheet drawn around her shoulders, as if even the first pink light of day might somehow be able to burn her fair skin.

  He would feel himself being studied, and would rise and embrace her. They would make love on the sand, the sheet over his back above her for protection against the sun, like a billowing tent—the day’s dry breezes already beginning—and then he would make a driftwood cookfire, and would catch and fry a catfish for his breakfast, and make eggs and bacon for hers.

  She would eat nothing that came from so wild and rank a place as the river, though she enjoyed with a perfect mix of distaste and longing watching him hunker naked by the fire, cock hanging down to the sand, spiny gutted catfish dipped in batter and leaning out over the skillet head and tail, Richard using a sock as a hot pad for the iron skillet, so that in that first pale light, pink turning already to copper, the scene could have been from a hundred or two hundred years ago, a nomadic Comanche or Apache.

  After breakfast, Clarissa would paint her body completely with zinc oxide, as would Richard, and they would go walking in the desert, naked save for their sandals, hats, and sunglasses.

  This was the most dangerous thing she did; the most dangerous thing she would ever do. She could feel the heat trying to burn through the crust of her white shell. She carried the tube of zinc with her and stopped to reapply it whenever a trickle of sweat revealed even the thinnest trace of flesh, and Richard carried a canteen on a strap slung over his shoulder.

  On they marched, like ghosts reanimated, following the sensual hills of the dunes, searching for nothing, only wandering; and knowing that if they got lost, or ran out of water, they would die, and die horribly.

  In the dazzling heat and blowtorch winds, their zinc coatings baked and continuously cracked and fell off in patches, so that they kept having to stop and mend each other’s gaps, as if repairing chinks in armor. Sand and grit and even husks of insect shells and stray feathers and the fur of jackrabbits and the occasional wind-tossed glittering scales of skeletal fish and reptiles would become affixed to the sweating sludge of their whitened, protective coating, so that it might have seemed that they themselves were evolving, and at a pace approaching light-speed, into some melded, awkward admixture of landscape: a crude experiment, and reeling, lost, frantic.

  None of these emotions were in them, however, when they were in the dunes. They took their time, gave themselves over to following the curious, shifting slopes as they might follow behind a herd of circus elephants, or camels, or some other odd and extravagant grouping; and they did not panic.

  Occasionally they would happen upon the little temporary oases, the just-appeared ponds of wind-rippled, sparkling water, once again attended to by birds, and sometimes by coyotes and kit foxes; and again, they would crouch on their hands and knees at water’s edge, or hunker, and drink from the lens of water like wild animals (the colorful birds swirling overhead), or they would drink with cupped hands, would let the cold water run down their arms, and would sprinkle the water on the backs of each other’s necks and faces: and then, reapplying even more zinc oxide, they would turn back, heading for the wide salty vein of the Pecos.

  And once back in their camp, they would bathe in that salty river. They would dress in cool long-sleeved shirts and light cotton pants and drive back to Odessa, feeling free and glorious to be shed of the old fur-and-grit paste-skin that had become like a part of themselves; and on the drive back, bleary-eyed, they would drink a gallon of fresh water, drinking straight from a plastic jug.

  Once back in town, Clarissa would sleep for the rest of the day and that night, and almost all of the next day as well, so drained would she be from the sojourn and its strange challenges; and it would not be until the next day that she would use her parents’ car to take the fossils she had collected all the way to Austin, a five-hour drive each way, to sell to a museum there, lying about the provenance of the discovery, saying only that she had found them in cardboard boxes upon cleaning out the estate of her grandfather.

  She would put the money in an Austin bank. She wasn’t sure how much she would need to go to wherever she was going, nor when or where that would be. In her first two months with Richard she had made almost $10,000, collecting and selling fossils, but she did not think that would be nearly enough. It would have helped to know where she wanted to go or what she wanted to do, but the door simply had not opened.

  She was certain that it would. It never occurred to her that it might not. And there was never a gathering of people—an office party in Odessa, a routine shopping trip, a Sunday morning in church—when, if a real door opened, her eyes did not turn to that door, to see who or what might be entering.

  There was another collector in the region, a Mr. Herbert Mix, an elderly man who had lost a leg to diabetes and who had once been enraptured with the search for the various caches of gold.

  Before his leg had been taken, Mix had evidenced a hunger not only for the gold itself, nor its legends and lores, but for everything else that might have been peripherally associated with it. Any trace of iron or steel he happened across in his diggings, or any other human artifact, he was compelled to save. He had begun searching for the treasure when he was seven; he was now seventy-four, and had lost his leg only ten years before. Over the years he had established a substantial hoard, one that filled numerous adobe huts in town.

  Old horseshoes, knife blades, wagon wheels, clay pots, human skeletons: anything was fair game, his hunger was nondirectional and unquenchable, and he hauled it all home, affixed an index card to each item stating the date and location of when and where it had been found, along with a brief narration of what Mix perceived to have been the circumstances of its deposition.

  Always lurid, his descriptions confirmed without fail his suspicions that there had never been an arrowhead that had not pierced human flesh, nor any skeleton that had perished under any circumstance save for a massacre or a sun-maddened wandering. The most intricate trinkets—a single rusted link of chain—were physical proof of the Emperor Maximilian’s exiled wanderings. Here, he had camped for t
he night, with only half a day’s lead on his pursuers, who intended to bring him back to Mexico to execute him for, among other things, having failed their expectations; here, this shard of pottery, was where Coronado sat with the chief of the Zuñis and informed him that the Zuñis were now subjects of the nation of Spain. Here, this fragment, was where the chief rose to his feet, broke the clay dish over his knee, and stalked off, vowing to make war upon the white man “until the ocean turned to stone again.” This tattered songbook, this hymnal, could only have belonged to the wife of the first pastor in the county, the pastor who had received the deathbed confessions of so many, and who, in turn, prior to breathing his last, murmured more treasure clues, scrambled, to his wife . . .

  It was all there, in little dusty earthen-floored storage sheds out back off the main streets of Odessa, the blood-and-guts matrix of his dreams, as well as the dreams of so many others; and, enthusiastically quantified and cataloged, it was for him as irrefutable as any history book.

  Mix opened a museum that showcased the trappings and residues of the treasures, if not the treasures themselves. He catered to the lonely and the unfulfilled; and in addition, to the long tables of mementos he kept on display in an abandoned garage—charging fifty cents per head to walk in and take refuge from the heat of the day (the eternal wind slinging sand against the curved metal roof of the garage, which had the shape and cavernous sounds of an airplane hangar), and charging a dollar for those who wanted to touch.

  Horseshoes, square nails, old coffee cans, and other refuse from the hundreds of searchers earlier in the century: nothing was sacred, and though Mix was unwilling to part with any of the hundreds of human skulls he’d accumulated over the decades, he was not above selling various lesser body parts—a vertebra, a phalange, or even a pelvic bone—to a motivated buyer.