All the Land to Hold Us

by Rick Bass

  The physical toll would rock him as nothing ever had before. A hundred and then a thousand times that day—he had gone too far—he knew that he should lay down the burden of his foolish pack and focus instead simply on getting out alive. He could feel the tender organs inside his pale skin, sheathed only in thin muscle, beginning to bake inside his body, could feel the blood soup that bathed the fragile meninges of his brain beginning to simmer, and as he trudged on, he dreamed of wading through reeds into the warm shallow water of a stock tank, the mud soft between his toes, and lying back then and floating on the surface of that water.

  After that, he imagined nothing, only pushed on, seized with some implacable and uncalmable ferocity—not even greed, but some primal essence of hunger, which surprised him, aware as he was of the hugeness of his need.

  The glistening sweat kept leaping from him, evaporating quickly, until he had no more to give, but still he struggled on, tumbling and falling, his pack full of treasures, or things that might have once been associated with treasures.

  He barely made it back out. He hauled the sledge of his pack up one dune after another. There was no clear path out, no trail, and each mistake or inefficient choice seemed to cost him tenfold.

  Twice he had gone into fibrillation, his body so dehydrated as to venture over into the territory of cardiac arrest and sunstroke, and he had lain down the last time, barely able to breathe—his lungs and breath quivering staccato now, within sight of the river, though he had not been able to make himself rise.

  He lay there, chest pounding and breath racing, and stared at the not-too-distant and extraordinarily familiar notch of Castle Gap, and Horsehead Crossing below.

  He was close enough to smell it. A pair of ravens drifted in the distance, black against the blue sky of summer. Had it been earlier in the day, he would have lain there and baked to death. As it was, dusk rescued him after only a couple of hours, and when he awoke again it was evening and the desert stars were out, and he was still lying on his side and looking at them upside down, so that they seemed to be the lights of some endless civilization far below.

  He did not have the strength to carry his pack any farther—each time he tried to stand, his heart leapt with the fright of a trapped wild animal—but he was able to drag it down the hill to the river, and to the river’s road where his jeep was waiting.

  And such was his weakness when he got there that he was unable to lift the pack into the jeep, but had to unload it, item by item—again lifting out the most mundane objects with the greatest reverence.

  He managed to haul his cracked and fried body up into the familiar seat of the jeep, but was too addled to take the key from the ashtray where he kept it stored. He sat there staring at the ashtray for the longest time.

  He was comforted just to know that the key was close, that he had made it all the way to within sight of it, or to within sight of the place where it was kept, even if he could not close that final distance, and he fell asleep—or into some chasm deeper than sleep but not all the way into unconsciousness, some floating, pre-embryonic place, his mind unmade and unformed and instead simply a tangled mass of electrical synapses emitting low and random signals—and it was not until dawn the next day that his life returned to him with any semblance of function.

  He drove on into town, slowly; had one glass of water, and then a second, drinking it carefully.

  He lay down on his bed—his chest was bruised purple from the severity with which his runaway heart had pounded—and he slept for thirty-six hours, rising only once to use the bathroom and drink another quart of water.

  For a week, every part of his body felt as if it had been beaten with a wooden club, and for the rest of his life, his kidneys ached whenever he encountered any kind of physical stress; and he was certain it was because of that one ordeal that he eventually lost his leg.

  But his treasures! They occupied a special place in his museum—the Ghost Wagon Train wing of the garage—and though he went out again and again looking for the man and the woman, he never saw them again; and in this regard, across the years—or so he told himself—the value of his treasures from that day grew and grew: the old Dutch oven, the broken saucer, the rusting knife blade, the Bible, the arrowhead with spear shaft still attached. That was all there was. That was all there would ever be.

  He might as well have traveled to the moon. And to his credit, he did not put those items up for sale.

  2

  CLARISSA FOLLOWED RICHARD that summer as if in a trance, and he let her, made no effort to speak the truth of their differences (partly because it was so unnecessary; it was only too evident). He led her around town, and around the desert, as if escorting some haltered or bridled animal that was being led to slaughter.

  As if taunting love, Richard would often come by Clarissa’s house just after daylight. She kept irregular hours, like those of some rarely seen animal, waking and then sleeping in small naps through the night, and wandering the world and performing her tasks and errands in the cool and lightless hours (as did a surprising number of the town’s residents—not out of fear of the light, but simply in order to avoid the heat).

  By nine o’clock, Clarissa would be showered and dressed and in the air-conditioned office, ready for the short run of the workday. Sometimes she napped in a back room on her lunch break, lying down on the carpet with neither sheet nor pillow, an alarm clock by her side, sleeping the unconscious fish-mouthed drooling slumber of the poleaxed; awakening on the alarm’s beeping, forty-five minutes later, with the carpet’s impressions deep upon one extended arm and the side of her face, and the day really only beginning for her, at that point.

  But in those few hours between the rise of the soft prairie dawn and the time when she had to leave for work, Richard would occasionally come by her house and make breakfast for her as she slept: fried eggs, from a neighbor’s henhouse, and corn tortillas wrapped in a damp clean cotton dish towel and steamed in the oven, and black coffee, filter-dripped, and thick bacon, cooked sizzling in a black iron skillet, and salsa made from cilantro and tomatoes he’d clipped from her garden there at the edge of first light.

  It was the sound of the blender that would awaken her, on those mornings when he came over to her house, and the chagrin she felt at being awakened so early was tempered by the pleasure of the knowledge of the meal he would be bringing to her.

  She would lie there between those two places, annoyance and anticipation, and would rise and fall between sleep and wakefulness, until finally he brought the meal to her in bed, as if he were in love with her: as if she dominated his almost every thought, and shaped the direction of his days.

  Other mornings, they ate out on the front porch. She lived at the edge of town, so that she was able to look west to the buff-colored desert, soft and luminous at that hour, with no waves of heat and mirage rising yet from its hardpan surface, nor any dust devils or curtain of blowing sand. The lift and plunge of the eternally throbbing pumpjacks would be the only movement.

  To the east, they could see and hear already the wakeful sounds of town—the mongrel coyote-dogs trotting down the brown streets in brown light, going from garbage can to garbage can; the whishing sound of sprinklers in the yards of the few people who still kept a few spindly fruit trees, and dying lawns; the groan of the delivery trucks, potato chip venders and beer and soda distributors and bakery vans, and the paperboy on his bike (the solitary thwap of each thin city-paper skidding onto the sidewalk or porch, and the almost musically arranged chorus line of barking dogs noting his passage through the neighborhood).

  The pumpjacks throbbing, not just to the west, but in all directions, pumpjacks set up even on empty lots within the city limits.

  Farther east, over the tops of the houses, they could see the modest rise of the sparkling new office buildings, constructed in only the last few years—and on such mornings, their hands clasped together, it would seem to Clarissa that she and Richard were emotionally in some similar place and time, an
d that for the time being that might even be how they preferred it—neither east nor west, nor past nor future.

  Richard would brush her hair some evenings for over an hour, and would stroke and rub and caress and otherwise administer to her sometimes for just as long, before beginning the interior acts of love. And there was always some trace or lingering resentment, and sometimes even fear, on Clarissa’s part, believing or suspecting that with such kindness—the prepared breakfasts, the extraordinary food, and his generous lovemaking—he was attempting to ensnare her and pull her out into the light; and when faced with such thoughts, every inch of her body would recoil, retreating again to some safer, darker distance; and each time, always, he would follow her calmly into that place, and lead her back gently to where she had been before she had become frightened: though never would she venture any farther, out into the heat and light.

  She was honest about it: he was an antidote to loneliness. He could be a balm against the heat, even if she was frightened of his force, and the temperature, the excitement, that seemed often to be attendant to both his ideas and his actions.

  She was content to only pick at the breakfast—the gleaming melon, the bright strawberries, blackberries, and blueberries—and to take the odors of these things with her black coffee. They would sit, one hand loose in the other’s—he admiring of her beauty, and she respectful of his radiant force, even as she was frightened of it—and Richard would end up having to finish her meal for her as the day came slowly to life; and still she would sit there next to him, desiring his body and desiring to share hers with him, even as that defensive part of her was stirring with a thing almost like hate.

  Whenever Richard, admiring her, stopped to consider how much time of perfection she might have left, the number he usually guessed was ten years, but from his vantage point that was nearly half his life, and it still seemed like such an extraordinary span of time that it might as well have been twenty or thirty years of knock-dead beauty she had remaining, or even forty, or even the rest of her life.

  If Clarissa had dared to think about it, she probably would have given herself only two years of remaining perfection. But she didn’t. She didn’t even assume that it would last until the end of each day. She huddled beneath the weight of that remaining time as a quail chick remains frozen beneath the shadow of a hovering hawk.

  The strong wind blowing the grass in waves, laying it down flat in shifting meanders, the bird remaining crouched. The wind gusting, swirling, rearing, and all the rest of the world hurrying past. Hide.

  All the rest of the town coming to life. She and Richard would hear the streetcar-like clack and clatter of the football team trotting through the streets on their morning training run. The holiness of that sport exceeded even the rites of the fundamentalist sects and churches to which most of the town belonged. In the height of summer, as football season approached, and then in the autumn, in the full pitch of battle, the tenor of the village differed very little from how it had been in Aztec villages centuries before, farther south, or the bloodlust rituals of the Roman gladiators, in which the ultimate pleasure came not in seeing one opponent triumph, but rather, the vanquishing of the weaker.

  The only saving grace might have been that the townspeople loved the players, or believed that they did. It was a poisonous trap in which the town’s greatest love could, however, be reached only by their boys’ victories; and no matter, really, whether in close and dramatic fashion or by overwhelming crush—the boys had only to win, to be most fully loved; the entire town baying like hounds, when this happened, a Friday-night chorus in the autumn that would set the coyotes out in the desert to howling, answering across that thin space between village and wilderness.

  And of this seemingly unconditional love that was in fact not at all unconditional, the players, even though still yet children, understood the nature or boundaries of it in ways that were never spoken to them, and of which they never spoke, even amongst themselves.

  The connection, though perverted and tenuous, was at least a connection; for the townspeople did endeavor, in their crude way, to raise the boys as they would a crop, bestowing gifts and favors as a farmer in a dry land would haul water to his or her crops, so that the crops might flourish, even if unnaturally, in that hostile environment.

  The songs were what the townspeople would hear first in the early mornings, in any season. The coaches pushed the boys as if driving them to their salvation, and as the boys ran, or pulled a wagon, fitting six in the harness at a time (the other players jogging alongside them in full combat gear, cleats tatting the pavement like some brute parade of tap dancers, with the players’ feet looking cloven and dainty beneath the monstrous bulk of their pads and helmets), the boys would all sing the school hymn and fight song, usually a cappella (though sometimes if the boys’ play had been laggard in the previous game, or if the worst and rarest tragedy, a loss, had befallen them, the coaches would punish them by having the boys in harness pull the marching band on a string of wagons, with the brass ensemble playing the full blaring, rousing piece, over and over); and it was like a parade, each and every morning one by which the townspeople could set their clocks.

  The song, and the demon-frightening tinny banging and tooting of the band, was the first sound a sleeping or resting citizen would hear, followed by the shouts and curses of the coaches, who also rode the wagons; and then, closer, the grinding and rasping of the steel wheels of the wagons.

  Closer still, the listener would hear the strangely rhythmic pattering of fourteen hundred and forty cleats rising and falling—sixty boys, twelve cleats to a shoe—and finally, the individual breathing of the boys as they passed: the sibilant intakes of air by the flyweight receivers and running backs, and the torturous wounded-bull gaspings of the out-of-shape linemen.

  The players’ faces would be limned with saintly agony as they pushed themselves further than ever before, entering each morning into a new country, and almost always not so much out of a love for the game as out of a perversion of that love, desiring foremost only to please the fans, and the coaches, and the other players—beginning to disappear in that manner, as if swallowed by some cleft in the world, even before they had fully emerged as individuals of any merit, worth, or interest: and from that point, the coaches pushed them still further and harder.

  The boys staggered and stumbled and hacked phlegm and spat clumsily. They ran drenched in sweat—the townspeople they passed could smell the fresh salt-odor of them, and could feel the radiant heat from the train of them—and when one of the boys in the harness stumbled before his time was up, the other boys in the harness would snatch him up quickly, before the rest of them tangled legs and they all went down together; and once again, it was as if no hitch had occurred, so that a viewer watching it could not be sure that the stumble had even happened.

  Generally they were clumsy, and the training process looked like what it was, work. Sometimes, however, there would be moments in which a purity of glide appeared not just in the pace and movements of one or even two or three of them, but in the whole conjoined body of them, and in which all the previous tension was released from their faces, and there seemed to be no torment or even effort required at all.

  On all their faces, in those brief and strange moments, would be expressions of calm rapture; and in some strange shift of realignment, their cleats would all be lifting and falling at the same time, rising and striking not with fourteen hundred and forty patterings, but one sound, and one voice.

  In these inexplicable moments, as unpredictable as desert rain, the boys ran like men, or with the grace and power of animals; and in those blissful moments there would be only silence, save for the steady, hungry grind of the steel wheels, and the one steady striking rhythmic slap of all cleats on track and on line, all in the same moment; and if the band were riding with them, its members would fall silent in slightly envious awe—a silence somehow more eloquent than even the most rousing compositions they had yet been able to muster�
��and both the band and the coaches would simply ride, in that breezy, gliding silence, behind the sweating backs of the harnessed pullers.

  So silent was their passage in these moments of grace that to an onlooker glancing out his or her kitchen window, the procession would have seemed utterly soundless, and that the carriage, the stage coach, was traveling with a smoothness of movement that is usually seen only in dreams.

  As well, the simple confidence they received from experiencing these moments of fluency gave them a strength in the world, an authority of bearing, that was an added advantage, enabling them to defeat even superior opponents, on the few occasions when such foes were encountered; and to their advantage also was the plain and grueling nature of their training regimen.

  And aiding them still further, though sending them also further down the road to ruin, was the twisted love the townspeople lavished upon them.

  Many of the locals parceled out not only the thing they called love, but also the physical treasures of the world: bushel baskets of withered fruit and sun-stunted vegetables from their hot, sandy little gardens, and cases of soda pop, and the latest albums, and new clothes, and even money, as well as surprises from whatever foreign or exotic lands any of the boosters might have visited recently. King salmon, gleaming and wolf-toothed, resting on a bed of ice; Japanese silk kimonos and gilded martial arts swords; autographed footballs and baseballs from famous athletes; ivory trinkets from Alaska, loose gemstones from Thailand; and all other manner of the many layers of dross in the world.

  The more able-bodied of the town’s and team’s boosters would be listening for the boys’ far-off but thunderous approach, and it was a joy for those fans to be able to run down out to the street with their offerings and, for a few strides, to keep pace with the rushing-past herd of boys.