by Rick Bass
In the yard behind his house, amongst the weeds, were enough rusting and rotting wagon-train wheels to supply three cavalries across five centuries. It had long been said that a person could not safely ride a horse through the dunes, because one of the horse’s hoofs would sooner or later snag on one of the thousands of abandoned wagon wheels; and until about the 1930s and ’40s, until Herbert Mix’s insatiable appetite had been unleashed fully upon the landscape, that had been true.
In addition to selling wagon wheels to decorate the front-gate entrances of ranches and ranchettes, he sold pickaxes and canteens, tents and army cots, to would-be searchers; and he had his own maps for sale too, diagrams of the position and orientation of what he perceived to be some of the more significant of his discoveries: and from those orientations he had offered interpretations.
He rented these maps out to novice prospectors for hard cash as well as a contractual agreement that stipulated a fifty-fifty split of any bounty that was found. And though Mix could rarely any longer get into the mountains, he offered himself as a consultant, and for a fee could be persuaded to haul himself up onto a midget burro and, beneath a pink or purple parasol gotten for $1.99 at the department store, head laboriously up into the mountains or out into the desert with one of a new generation of seekers, sipping whiskey and pointing out places to dig, while ruminating upon and interpreting each spadeful of dirt.
Across the span of over half a century of his disease, he made a lot of money; not as much, perhaps, as he might have been able to produce from the liquidation of a single strongbox of bullion, but enough—more than enough, had he lived prudently, conservatively, moderately. And in a cautious, considered manner, he might have been able to summon, across time, some approximate and perhaps satisfactory semblance of the wealth not from any discovery of the treasure itself, but simply from the sustained dream of it.
He failed in prudence, however. He was unable to restrain his appetite, nor the terrifying euphoria he would sometimes feel, midmeal, when he first realized that, despite prodigious consumption, enough would never be enough.
And so he had not only sold, he had bought. His goal was to sell the unworthy, the duplicated, and the common; but because it all had value in his eyes, he was rarely able to refrain from purchasing the dregs of memorabilia that came sweeping through his museum, brought there by fellow treasure seekers like the cracked and salt-corroded leavings of some reverse tide, running always counter to his own.
No sooner had he closed a sale on a pickax, or a time-pitted cannonball, than some wayfaring derelict would come in with yet another skull, or a sun-mottled medicine vial, or a bird-point arrowhead with the cedar arrow-shaft still attached, wanting to trade it for whiskey money. He had once bought a saber for four hundred dollars; a conquistador’s helmet for seven hundred. A rust-gutted six-shooter for a hundred dollars; an odd-shaped stone with an etching on it—perhaps authentic, perhaps not—for two hundred. Even tattered articles of clothing—a faded straw hat, a pair of sand-blown chaps stiff as the sun-dried hide of some bone-bleached steer; a salt-crusted boot—were not beyond his desire.
He spent what he had, for the tide was always coming in.
Always, the skulls were what intrigued him the most. In the early days of his obsession, he had been enamored with the entire skeletal carriage; but as he aged, and then even more so as he shed one of his own legs, it became only the skulls that held interest for him: and of those skulls, his favorite part was the upper; the smooth, boulder-rounded curve of sutured cranium, repository of an infinity of gone-by senses, of sparkling cells of memory now dried to dust and blown forgotten back into the world, leaving behind only the curious whorls of geometry, the empty skull as smooth and lifeless as the inner sweep of a wave-polished, long-vacant conch shell or some other calcified vessel, like the specimens held up to one’s ear in childhood in order to hear the echo of the sea’s roar.
The other, lesser skeletal parts he kept piled about in his weedy backyard. At first he had attempted to arrange and catalog them, with painted reference numbers corresponding to their detached headpieces, but over the years he abandoned that practice and now merely stacked them into one general boneyard.
Before the physical limitations of his age and his condition had caught up with him, he had rented a great balloon-tired tractor, and with a deep-toothed harrow had combed the troughs between the dunes with the patience of a deep-sea fisherman, keenly attuned beyond the throttled tremblings of the tractor to the dull snag and clink of iron tooth finding rounded bone; and when he felt or sensed such interruption, he would throw the tractor into neutral and hop down and trot out through the warm sand to go gather up his discovery: examining it eagerly, searching for clues to the wounds of battle.
Despite the intensity of his hoarding, his remained always an amateur’s interest, and he was never able to ascertain any ethnicity of the skulls, nor sex, nor age. He simply gathered them, like pumpkins, and dropped each one into a burlap bag that he kept hanging from the rear fender of the tractor.
Other times he would not feel the harrow’s tug, but would ride for unknown stretches of time as if hypnotized by some lulling combination of the tractor’s idle and purr, and by the sight of the dunes all around him like waves, and by the heat, and by the brightness. Crossing-over seagulls, traveling from the Gulf Coast to some inland lake—Yellowstone, farther north, or the Great Salt Lake, or even the smaller Juan Cordona Lake—would see the tractor trawling below, and from habit would veer and follow it for a while, as they did with the shrimpers’ boats at sea, or the threshers tilling the wheat fields farther north, churning up worms and insects.
But there was nothing for them below but dry sand and the occasional skull or arm bone (the radius or ulna sometimes crooking up from the sand in the precise position of a swimmer executing a perfect crawl-stroke, as if having labored all this time to come back up from the depths).
In his reverie, Herbert Mix would travel on for some great distance, until some stray thought or image finally awakened him; and he would look back and see, in the long furrowed row behind him, a wealth of risen skulls, shining like melons in the sunlight, and the gulls circling; and again he would shut his tractor off, and throw the burlap bag over his shoulder, and wander back into the desert to gather time’s harvest, retracing the furrows of his path.
The bag would grow heavy as he wandered that long furrow, and he would sometimes be made uneasy by the thought and then the belief, as the heft of the bag grew greater and the skulls clanked and rattled, that he was not so much walking on sand as he was on skulls; that were the teeth on his harrow longer, they would find even more skulls; that the world was nothing but skulls, and a tangle of skeletons, all the way down—that even the mountains themselves were but a thin patina of earth drawn taut across that tangled assemblage—and when he turned to look back at his tractor, as if for reassurance that he was still in this world, he would be further discomforted by the distance he had traveled, without having realized it.
The tractor would be only a shining glint in the faraway blending of haze and dune, barely even identifiable as an artifact of man, and Mix would be overcome with loneliness; but still, he would turn around and press on, harvesting his skulls, for it was less frightening for him to pretend that the feeling was not real, than to acknowledge it, and to turn in fear and loneliness back to the tractor.
Like a coward as well as a stoic, he pushed on. Ravenous. A slight pain in his leg, twenty years before the fact, as he wandered the bone fields collecting the legs of those he had never known.
A miracle had happened to Herbert Mix only once, and in many ways his life was poorer for it rather than richer, for it had been so many years since the phenomenon had revealed itself, and so many years had he spent in the dunes awaiting expectation of others like it, that his waiting had turned finally into disappointment, and the disappointment to frustration.
He had seen the phenomenon when he was forty years old. He was out prowling the
dunes, as he often did, walking with a backpack and compass, ribbons and long willow poles. A shovel and a sack lunch; a straw hat. Anything of interest that he came across that would fit into the pack, he would load into it before continuing on his way; and anything that was too bulky or heavy, he would do his best to mark on the map, and would drive a willow pole into the sand, affixing bright pink and blue ribbons to the top of the pole like prayer flags, and would hope that the dunes would not change so much by the time he returned.
The miracle had occurred on the summer solstice. Such an event was of no special import to Herbert Mix, other than the fact that the day would be long, and, still being in relatively good health, he intended to travel a long way, to utilize the fullness of the day.
He had been traveling already for half the day—trudging bronze-skinned beneath the sun—when he crested a tall dune and looked down and saw, in the opposing and balanced wind-scalloped trough on the back side of the dune, the most astounding sight: what he took at first to be a modern-day wagon train, complete with gaunt horses and gaunt travelers, laboring to get the mired wagon back on track.
Mix’s eyes blurred in the wind, and his heart froze with terror, as in that first moment his eyes tried to inform his brain of the impossible: that these lost travelers were still wandering from the last century; that time had stranded them—had braided around them, leaving them untouched.
He stood petrified on the ridge, the ribbons on his flags flapping in the wind like the pendants of some child playing conquistador; and it was some time before the chill in his heart subsided and his true vision returned to him, so that he was able to see that the wagon train was not captured by ghosts but was simply the remains of the past, little touched and well preserved.
He hurried down into the basin with all the greed and astonishment of any seeker. Already the swirls and back currents of wind were bringing a fine flashing sift of sand into the basin, as when rising waters seek to fill a low spot. He hurried over to the wagon train and marveled at the story before him, examined all the parts of it with his hands, still not daring to believe what he was seeing.
There were but two huge horses in the traces: all bones, now, and crumpled to their keels in various states of collapse. Mix got the impression they were down on their knees, pawing for water, and in the back of the wagon (canvas top long gone, but hooped ribs still intact) lay a skeleton in perfect grinning repose; not as if he had been fever-wracked at the point in time when the wagon had finally gotten bogged down in the sand, and not as if he had already been dead at that point, so that it was merely his lifeless and soulless body that the wagon had been transporting (why else had he not gotten out to try to help, nor even stirred?), but instead as if he had been enjoying everything so immensely—the sickness, the bouncing ride, and then the agony of getting stuck yet again; and enjoying, above all, the waterless, blazing heat—that he had been unwilling to bestir himself from this position of ecstasy.
The rider’s hands lay clasped across his chest. His gnarled and rodent-chewed boots were still on the remains of his feet, as if he had intended to lie down for only a little while; as if he had intended, once the euphoria had passed, to get back up and go out and help.
It was the figure kneeling at the right rear axle that intrigued Mix the most. She, too, still had her boots on, and her hat, still sand-filled, had not traveled far from her bright shining head. Her blouse or shirt was long gone—scraps of that fabric shredded by time and used in the lining of the nests of generations of mice and birds—though her skirt, evidently of a hide material, was still partially intact, tattered but drawn taut around her, as if it had been her skin, not another animal’s, all along.
The woman had had straight long reddish-brown hair—hanks of it still lay attached to the hat, and on the quilt on which she seemed only to be resting—and to Herbert Mix’s great horror and discomfort, he found himself aroused. As if the woman were somehow still living. As if time had vanished, or never occurred. As if the elegant shapes and suppleness of flesh were but a layer of clothing, obscuring or covering something even more beautiful, stark, and vital.
He shook these thoughts from his head and moved a step closer. The woman was leaning against the stuck wheel, collapsed against it as if praying—still praying—and Herbert Mix took out his shovel and dug cautiously but easily around the wheel.
At its base he found more quilt.
The sand was still sifting into the newly uncovered basin, like that which runs through an hourglass. Herbert Mix went over to the left rear wheel and began digging, and found another quilt; and under each front wheel, more quilts.
It was obvious to him what had happened. The iron wheels had been just a little too narrow, and the wagon a little too heavy (perhaps if the man had been able to get out and walk—had he been a big man—or even been able to help push, things might have been different; perhaps, perhaps), and the horses were too tired to continue to pull the heavy load.
The woman had been pushing them on, three feet at a time, making the journey easier for them, if even only slightly, by positioning the quilts under each wheel, so that it was for the horses as if they were pulling across that quilted surface, rather than plowing so deeply—muscles quivering; sweat pouring from their huge bodies, and not a sip of water for miles ahead—and finally, the heat had killed one of them, horse or woman first, Mix couldn’t tell.
Perhaps when the horses went down, it was at that point that the woman had leaned her head for the last time against the stuck wagon wheel.
There were twin oaken water barrels mounted upright on the back of the wagon, and out of morbid curiosity, Herbert Mix pried open the lids and looked inside—Still empty, he thought, fingering the heft of his own canteen.
He gave the wagon a cursory search for any possible bullion—what but treasure, he wondered, could have inspired such ferocious and dogged wandering?—and finding nothing of real worth—an ancient cracked Bible, pages fluttering back and forth in the wind as if some unseen reader was furiously scanning for some certain passage only dimly remembered—Herbert Mix pondered and debated on what to fill his pack with, knowing (the rising sand was up over his calves now; had risen to the kneeling woman’s wind-sharpened haunches) that when he returned, all would be vanished—knowing that trough would become ridge, and ridge, trough.
In the end, he settled for the mundane, the seemingly trivial: a pair of reading glasses, a pocket watch, a diary that he would later examine for clues to treasure, though there were none. An old Dutch oven; plates, knives, forks. The wind-whipped Bible, if only to cease its furious movements.
Nothing from the man or woman—not even their skulls—but from the back of the wagon, a riding saddle, still in tolerable condition, one that might possibly be restored. His mind was already racing, thinking ahead to the text he would put on the index cards. Surely they had been headed to the gold fields in California, if not already on their way back. What else was there?
He turned and stared back in the direction from which they had come.
From all the trouble they’d been having—laying down those quilts, lunging through the sand three feet at a time, stopping to pull the quilts out, dig under the wheels, clawing with bloodied hands, laying them down again—it seemed certain that they must have jettisoned any tonnage of gold elsewhere; and it was one of the few moments of truth in Herbert Mix’s life, one of the few times he was ever given pause to realize how vast the desert really was, and what tiny space such treasure might truly occupy.
The wind continued to carve funnels of sand out from beneath the cornice: cutting it lower and lower, and as the lip of the undercut cornice fell, re-formed, and fell again—moving ever closer to the scene below, like some stalking giant—Herbert Mix set about the planting of his flags; scrambled with drowning gold-lust up the sand slope, sinking to his knees under the weight of his useless bounty. He quickly began setting the poles along the windward rim of the basin, even as that rim continued to be scalloped downwa
rd.
Drenched in sweat, he succeeded in ringing the caldera with eight of his poles before the skeletons had disappeared beneath the sand, not like victims but like divers choosing to descend. Mix watched as the sand dimpled in waves that showed only vaguely their sleeping shapes below, and then nothing: the wagon sinking too in that manner, as if it was the weight of the wagon, the thing to which they clung, that was pulling them down, and that if only they could have released themselves from it, they might have been borne back up to the surface.
His poles were leaning and then toppling as the ridge advanced across the basin, again like something walking; and as the level of the ridge lowered itself to meet the rising trough of filling sand, the sight gave him the most disorienting feeling—as if he were surfing; and without his moving, it seemed nonetheless that he was moving, riding some immense and powerful wave: and he knelt there, grit stuck to his sweating body, skin broiling, lungs heaving.
It was not until the ridge had leveled itself completely with the trough, with the pioneers suddenly beneath that astounding burden, that Herbert Mix realized he was sinking, descending into a new sandy basin much as a doodlebug falls prey to the ant-lion’s simple but cunning trap of gravity.
Fighting the shifting substrate, he labored halfheartedly up the new ridge, the one that seemed to be walking away from him, and began gathering his fallen flags. He would place them elsewhere in the desert on his walk out—planting them in what he hoped would be more trustworthy locations, near the scarce patches of semipermanent willow, saltbush, and tumbleweed; and he would attempt, with his drunk-man’s trudging stagger, to measure approximate distances, in leagues and varas, while sketching a crude map of his backtrack: but he knew even as he paused to construct these tiny markers that there was no hope, that the miracle was as good as gone, and in some strange way more ungraspable now for having been seen and lost than had it been only imagined and not yet found.
