by Rick Bass
When that happened, Richard’s heart knew true terror, and he would grab the shovel and scramble back up toward that button of sky, before the entire gullet clenched and closed in on itself. Richard knew that if that happened, there would be no hope of Clarissa finding a shovel and digging to release him, no chance of her scrabbling and clawing bare-handed to exhume him, burrowing into the salt like a dog or coyote until her bare knuckles bled and she herself had tunneled down fifteen or twenty feet.
He imagined instead how she would rise and stand over the misshapen place where the hole had been, waiting perhaps for only a moment—as if to see whether a single hand, or a hand and an arm, might protrude, groping—before she turned and, with her long white sheet still wrapped around her, walked over to the jeep, climbed inside, started it up, and drove away.
Buckets of salt would continue to slip and fall from the walls as he hurried to the surface. He had to shut his eyes against the stinging saltiness. As he drew nearer to the top, he could taste and scent the fresher, hotter air above. Each time that he finally emerged (tossing the shovel out first, which was always a sight that startled Clarissa, watching from the tent), his head and shoulders appearing level with the surface, clambering out in the manner of a child climbing out of a swimming pool, with the world’s real air upon him, he would feel in those first few moments a coolness upon him, as the sweat evaporated quickly from his bare skin.
Almost immediately thereafter, all moisture whisked away from him, he would feel himself beginning to bake again, encrusted with drying salt, like some riverine crustacean dredged from unknowable fathoms.
He would walk to the tent and open one of the chilled beers, and cover his nude salt-body with a sheet, and sit on the outside of the tent and speak to sweltering Clarissa inside, telling her of the things he had seen on his latest vertical journey, and what it had been like. And after this brief visit, he’d resume work on the cathedrals: fashioning spires and buttresses, arched bridges and porticos—working as a child might work: playing, not working—and in a way that she would not have done earlier in the summer, Clarissa put up with his foolishness.
She napped, giving herself over to the heat, and dreamed fevered dreams in which fear was no longer a factor. She dreamed of flying, of paddling dark rivers without a lantern, and of descents into cooler and darker places. She dreamed of writhing serpents, of pistols that would not fire; dreamed of burning rings of fire, and of bears, and wolves, and lions—once of buffalo, and another time, of an elephant—but never was there any fear in the dreams: only a lucid and luminous unscrolling of images so wondrous in their beauty that they could not possibly have anything to do with her own sleeping life; and she slept well, drinking in the vibrancy of the dreams, and awoke feeling rested and refreshed for having had them.
She rolled over on her cot, bathed herself with a damp washcloth, and read. She would tire of that, then, and would sit up and stare with fascination and youthful lust at the sheen of Richard’s buttered arms, working the blocks and buckets of salt, manhandling the salt, giving rise to a physical dream of astounding vision, forming it as if from the materials of nothing but the vapors of heat and some magic in his heart, some dream or plan that the world had agreed to let him conjure.
She stirred on her cot, watched him, watched his salt castle rising higher: evaluating him as if anew, as her cold and frightened heart began to warm and stir like some winter-chilled seed.
For miles in all directions around the lake, pumpjacks were scattered, throbbing and clanking, rising and falling with a patience and yet also an insistence that brought to mind the notion of some single-minded living organism, rather than the machinery of man. The pumpjacks seemed like some semidomesticated stock, turned out into the fields to graze and forage upon whatever fragments they could find.
There were no pumpjacks in the immediate vicinity of the lake—the underground mountain of salt was all but impossible to drill into, catching and bending the pipe with the unruly shifting and sliding of its gelatinous mass; and in any event, there was no known oil housed within the vast reservoir of salt—but the underground formations that had been shoved aside by the salt’s rising perturbations had buckled and folded in manners conducive to trapping and holding oil and gas on the flanks of that rising dome, so that the area around the lake was an excellent place to drill; and it was in this area that many of Richard’s prospects lay: so that even as Richard, on a day off, might be working shirtless with a shovel, digging a shaft down into the heart of the salt, one of his wells, only three or four miles distant, might also be sinking down into the earth.
Clarissa continued to watch him work, and tried to distinguish Richard’s own force and desire from that of the land’s; tried to isolate it, out there on the salt plain, so that she could be more sure of what it was she was getting into—if she even decided to go further into it.
Not realizing that even in the daydreaming or imagining of it, her hold was already loosened, and that she was already drifting his way: following the path of her gaze, as if not believing or understanding that the initial groove cut for any path is scoured first by the simple dream.
She studied him as he worked. Could she imagine becoming an oilman’s wife?
Could she envision a long and rich life spent together with him, richer than even these few summer months had been?
In the blazing landscape of the salt plain, and in that country of supreme unaccountability, where a traveler was responsible only for him- or herself, it was easy to dally with the imagination.
The water was pouring out of him. She feared he was too exposed. He paused in his labors, took a swig from his canteen. Some of the water spilled from his mouth and trickled down his throat and chest, and she touched her hand to her own chest, as if savoring it, and imagined a lake in the woods; imagined the two of them living, or vacationing, at a cabin in the woods somewhere in the cool Far North.
In the dazzling heat and whiteness, she let her mind slide, and dared to imagine the two of them together in a cabin on a hill above a lake at night in the dark, early in the autumn, window squares of the cabin lit by lantern or candlelight, so that the cabin itself would be like a candle, glowing in the heart of the cool dark forest.
Finally, each time, she would shake the image from her mind. What did it matter? It was all make-believe, anyway.
Often, in his burrowings and well diggings, Richard would encounter bones. Just beneath the surface were strata upon strata of tangled arms and legs, and the long, elegant ghost-xylophones of vertebrae; the globe-like skulls, the phalanges like jewelry spilled from a snapped necklace.
Sometimes Richard would use the long bones rather than tree branches to shore up the sagging places in his shafts, but would exhume, along with his buckets of salt, the skulls, to sell to the insatiable Herbert Mix.
It seemed to Richard sometimes, such was the richness of the past, that he was lowering himself into a giant salty soup or stew in which humans had been the main ingredient.
Clarissa and Richard would assemble the skulls along the lake’s edge, to dry quickly in the sun, so that the salt crust could then be brushed from their pates, making them more presentable for market. Without knowing the histories of all the centuries of people who had passed and squabbled over this place, they were learning it through their simple handling of the skulls—learning it as a child, walking along the gravel bar of a rushing stream and picking up certain polished and banded stones of sediment, might learn something of the towering mountains far to the north, from which those stones had long ago passed.
Most of the skulls, and the tangle of bones, were resting in the top ten feet of salt. And knowing this (when Clarissa was fretting overmuch about not having earned much money that week from their trades with Herbert Mix), Richard would set aside his child’s-play construction of the fantastic salt castles, and would focus on harvesting basketfuls of the skulls.
Like a beachcomber digging clams, he would shovel all the way around the pe
rimeters of the lake and, as if furrowing a garden, he would dig long, shallow trenches, working shirtless under the malevolent sun, able to tell just by the tug upon his shovel when the metal tip touched old bone; and in this manner, working a chosen shallow contour around the lake’s perimeter, he would exhume a new skull every ten or fifteen yards.
As if digging up root crops, he would lift the skulls from the furrows and set them beside his trench to dry, to be gathered later, and would continue around the lake. And after he had gathered that trip’s harvest and returned home, the desolate landscape would appear even more of a ruination—an abused and squandered wasteland, if such a thing was possible: the ragged, wandering furrows with the residual, cast-aside, undesired bones—femur, ulna, radius—resting beside the trenches, and the entire shoreline looking as if wild boars had been tilling with their snouts a previously untouched glade, hazed now beyond reckoning.
The desire of the world to assemble two pieces into one—to pursue and conjoin, as if for no reason other than the sake of conjoining. The two young lovers were individuals, unique and specific in the world, and yet there were moments when they felt sharply as if they were but puppets, void of purpose or free will.
It seemed to Richard already, even in his youth, that there was in the world but one breath of the single pattern that plays itself over and over again, as steady and considered as the respirations of a sleeping animal—and yet the world, not just the living world but the old world below, seemed to have some say in deciding which stories got carried forward, shaped and reshaped, and which stories got hauled back down into the abyss, as if but fodder and fuel for the maw of some heartless, forward-clanking machine.
There was no part of Richard or Clarissa that did not understand this by summer’s end and autumn’s beginning, even if only subconsciously. Both as individuals and as a pair, they moved with an unspoken but increasing desperation, frantic to make it up and over into the land of their dreams, or at least into the territory of those dreams that lay shimmering in the nearby haze like the oases cast from desert heat: Clarissa desiring still an opulence commensurate with the flash of her coming few years of physical beauty.
He continued to desire her further: to capture her first because she was beautiful, and second because she was moving away from him. He too envisioned a life in the woods, in a cabin by a lake, with stars above a dark forest, the cabin aglow in the darkness with yellow window-light, and a partner inside, a lover or a wife, who was made happy by the sight of him, and who was not afraid to show her love, who was not afraid of anything, really—and who could travel with him farther into new and unclaimed or unmapped or unknown country, constructing edifices and cairns and markers together as they traveled, and pausing in their travels to spend time, to lavish time, upon each other, in the brief years before their time ran out and they were covered over.
The fossils they found were not enough, the relics and artifacts they sold to the obsessive Herbert Mix were not enough, the oil and gas that Richard was finding and siphoning, suctioning, pumping out of the earth was not enough, and they both loved more intently now, squeezing each other more tightly, their arms and legs agrapple when they had sex, and daring (as if this might be the thing that had been preventing them from reaching their goals) to dive, for the first time, deeper: staring into each other’s eyes questioningly, bravely, in silent interrogation; hovering over one another, and each breathing the warm breath from his or her lungs into the mouth and lungs of the other—Clarissa not running, for once, but standing her ground to examine and absorb the love that Richard had to give her; and Richard, with similar bravery, knowing that the chances were good she would be leaving.
And by October, when the heat of the desert was finally broken, it seemed to both of them one morning that they had finally somehow crossed over into that new territory; crossing over perhaps in the night as they slept, with their passage across that unmarked boundary unnoticed, at the time. And they relaxed and relished being in such a country for the first time.
And rather than pushing on with zeal and ferocity, they slowed to a walk once more; strolling, as it were, hand in hand through the richer, newer fields. They paused to revel in their bravery.
For a while, they could glide, sweeping along on the momentum of their labors, having entered, through perseverance and diligence and some daring, that small expanse and moment of grace not unlike that which the football players sometimes achieved, when pulling the loaded wagons: that same glide in which every footstep, every surge, was in synchrony, with the recipients of that glide aware of the gift, and yet also quickly, comfortably, assuming it to be their due: and assuming that once such a glide had been reached, it would never again fall away.
(And after it did fall away, they persisted in believing, for the longest time, that it would be right back: that they were only a step, two steps, away. That they had only looked away for a moment and gotten distracted or slightly off-balance, but that with a little extra surge, a little extra power, they could step right back up into that slipstream. And sometimes they did, though other times they never saw it or knew it again; though even when they did find their way back into that current, they were surprised by how much more effort it took than what they had thought would be required. And finally, one day, they stepped back for the last time, and let it go on past, and remembered, for a while, but no longer participated.)
No sooner had the new intimacy been reached between them, however, than the fear caught back up with Clarissa: as if in turning to glance at the old country, she could not help but turn back toward it.
When the fear returned for her, it came like serpents snaking their way across a tin roof in the night. The new fear returned from all its old places: the despair that she had been born into the wrong place; that she was sinking in the world, unseen—but there was also a newer bolt of fear coming at her now, the fear that new fondness, if not love, was growing in her for Richard.
She held the fear silently—pretending to be wondering to herself what she would do with it, even as the other part of her knew full well what she would do with it.
And Richard, who picked up on the echo of her fear almost the first day it arrived—discerning the return of his own greatest fear, her flight, almost from the start, as might a veteran firefighter scent the newborn wisps of smoke from a distant fire—spent a tortured week, and then a month, denying it and holding it down, and then covering it with a second layer, and a third, until both he and Clarissa were wired tight from the overburden of that pressure, and from the rivers of sand that seemed to be coming in over her.
They went to a football game one Friday evening and barely spoke to one another; lost in their fears and worries they forgot to cheer for the Odessa team. Further into the game, they tried to cover up their inattentiveness but ended up cheering accidentally for a poor play rather than a good one.
They went home and retreated again beneath good sex, but it was only another layer above what lay below, and the more she said nothing of her leave-taking, the more it became a certainty to both of them.
She still had nowhere to go to, no prospect or avenue, but so immense now was her fear and her need that she was reduced to the desperation of choosing a flight based only upon the dream of a location by its name alone. The daunting task, with her back against the wall, of being forced to convert the abstract into the real.
Nothing with a punchy, stark, one-syllable name like Minsk, or Hunt; nothing rough and guttural, like Crockett, and nothing so similar to the treacherous sinuosity of the name of her own private hell, Odessa. Nacogdoches wouldn’t do, nor Laredo, nor Del Rio.
Fort Worth sounded safe and solid, but she knew of its reputation as a former cow town. Houston intrigued her, though she feared she’d be lost in the lights. San Antonio, while inviting, was too close to Odessa.
It would never have occurred to her to consider taking flight from Texas entirely. Paris, New York, or San Francisco, and the possibility of failure, terrifie
d her almost as much as did the desert. She wanted a staging ground, an eddy, between worlds, in which she could escape the old terror and make preparations for a second flight.
Like an opium eater, that fall, she pretended to still be in love, after having first entered that country; but she kept dreaming of, and searching the map for, other places, other names.
She knew or believed that she wanted something soothing, something riverine, perhaps, after so long an absence of such. She liked the l in Blanco, the white-blanket sound of it, and liked in her imagination the clear waters attendant to Rocksprings or Cat Springs. She liked also the l’s and the femininity in the town names of Alice, and Galveston, and Temple; but in the end, she settled upon Dallas, as had so many before her—the city (she had seen pictures) gleaming and gargantuan with its skyscrapers rising above the flat grasslands and wavy hills around it, its own ambition and self-import fortress-like amongst the plains.
And in her mind, like a child constructing a diorama for a science project, she began assembling the hopes of some fantastic story for herself; and she said nothing of any of it to anyone.
Richard watched the distance between them widen, and in his mind observed pine needles resting on a forest floor dry out and then smolder from the heat: the reckless, unstoppable smoldering.
They still went into the desert, searching and gathering; and as if the call to her flight was rising now to full conspiracy with fate, she began to find treasures: inexplicable discoveries for which not even the gluttonous Herbert Mix could fashion a narrative.
