by Rick Bass
Chief among these was a chest full of gold-hammered goblets, with ruby insets—two dozen of them, each heavy as lead, and spotless—discovered beneath the sand. Digging deeper then, they found the curve of a wagon wheel, and deeper still, the wagon itself.
More scratching revealed the tattered lace of a wedding dress—they dug more slowly now, Clarissa being careful as ever to keep her parasol balanced atop one shoulder—and beneath the ragged silk found the bare foot of a skeleton, still fully clothed, as if the traveler had just returned from the wedding and had not yet had time to change.
They dug deeper. Even Clarissa worked hard on this excavation, sometimes setting her parasol aside; and when her long-sleeved white linen shirt slipped down off her shoulder, for once she did not panic and slide it back over her shoulder, but kept digging, searching for the groom, if there was any, and perhaps even the wedding party.
Richard noticed that her shirt kept sliding down but thought it was a good sign that she was willing to expose herself—to have some other passion that exceeded her own protection.
It was true that there were places on her neck and shoulders where the perspiration of her labors and the friction of the sand was rubbing off the protection she’d so conscientiously applied, but Richard believed that between the three layers of protection—the parasol, the shirt, and the zinc oxide—she would be all right. A little sun might even be good for her.
By the middle of the afternoon they had most of the sand dug out from around the wagon, and had the bride—a tall, slender woman, still fully clad—sitting up on the back of the wagon, as if watching them work. Richard kept cautioning Clarissa to drink water, but she was relentless. He guessed the goblets to be worth $10,000 as a collection, but sensed that it was not for further treasure or gold that she dug.
“Slow down,” he told her, as he might caution her of some precipice ahead, but she shook off his warnings, working as if intoxicated by love; and when he took her arm to suggest to her again that she be cautious, she finally agreed, but pulled him under the faint slatted shade of the wagon and made love to him, keeping her shirt on as was his request, but nothing else.
Even for their usual energy, it was for both of them an event of surprising uncontrollability: as if they had wallowed down into some suppressed reservoir of an eros and lust so raw and overpressured that it might injure or even destroy them, upon their exodus.
They bumped and crashed against the wagon above them, in their overhead hoistings, and with their knees and elbows and the arced shape of their movements carved out deeper pits in the cool and newly exposed sand, but feeling nothing, only burning.
Their grappling and lifting threatened to shake the wagon apart, and the bride sitting above them tipped over on her side, seemed now to be holding or clinging to the wagon as she might long ago have done as it jounced over the rocky path.
There was no other sound in the desert, and eventually, the strange energy of explosive lust that they had unearthed passed on through them, and on up into the heated blue sky; and they were once more merely hot and exhausted lovers, tentative, and once again spent.
They lay there for only a short while, Richard wanting to spoon in and be tender for a while, but Clarissa was anxious, as if still with sexual energy, to resume digging. He was able to hold her for a few minutes, though, and as they lay there, sweating and gritty, latticed in sun and shadow, it began to feel to Richard as if he was holding, in both arms, an enormous fish; and though she did not struggle, he could feel the coiling of her muscles, their readiness once more for flight, and he released her.
Clarissa forced herself to lie there with him for another thirty seconds after being released, with their bare feet and ankles still twined loosely together and sticking out from beneath the wagon, so mocking of the bones that dangled likewise above them from the bride sitting on the back of the wagon as if standing watch over them.
They each drank some water afterward, and dressed, but soon Clarissa was working the shovel again with the same intensity.
By dusk they had the horses unearthed, the team of four still in cracked leather harness and dead on their knees, heads bowed not as if in defeat but only rest; though still they could find no groom, nor any other skeletons.
Clarissa grew irritable.
The sun was setting orange behind the dunes and the heat was off the land. They had brought picnic supplies with them, and they stopped now to reconnoiter. With the sun no longer direct upon them, the sand gave them less warmth now, though still it provided plenty, as if some great fire were nearby. Clarissa took off her shirt and bra, and Richard could see then that she had gotten a lot of sun. He could not tell yet how bad it might be, or if it could even be called a proper sunburn, so pale was her skin elsewhere; nor could she yet feel any pain, and if anything, she seemed to be infused with the general pleasure one sometimes feels after a long full day in the sun, purged and cleansed.
They would have liked to have sat in the back of the wagon for their picnic, but ceded that space to the skeleton, treating the bride even across the century of her death with the deference they would provide to a stranger; and there was in their deference also the acknowledgment that the wagon was still, in some manner, the possession of the bride rather than her discoverers.
They sat cross-legged in sand-scallops they carved out next to the wagon, looking like students seated at the feet of an esteemed teacher, receiving a counsel and an instruction they had long been awaiting.
Richard poured wine into two of the golden ruby-studded goblets, and he carved open a small, perfect cantaloupe. They ate the wedges of it with their hands, wiping their mouths afterward with the crooks of their sunburned arms. He had brought strawberries and chocolate bars too, and in the heat the chocolate had melted, so they stirred the strawberries (picked only the day before from the garden of one of Herbert Mix’s neighbors) in the chocolate, and Richard fed those to her, and she took them from his fingers with her mouth, not with any of the old caution or hesitancy, but neither was it with any true zeal.
Instead, she regarded him, as she ate the strawberries and licked the chocolate from his fingers, with a clear-eyed, evaluating look that seemed to possess the ability, that day at least, to see into the future: and watching her watch him, as she slowly chewed the strawberries, he would have liked to have known what it was she was seeing, and how far out she was seeing it.
He leaned in against her breast, and for a moment she let him, but then would have no more of it, and rose, taking both of his hands, leaving him—they both knew now, as if that final decision had been arrived at with the help of the teacher’s tutelage—and in that moment, it was a realization so strongly felt that it seemed to Richard later, in memory, that he remembered hearing something crack at the time.
She led him back to the initial treasure chest, and from that point, they each resumed digging in separate directions, still not knowing exactly what they were looking for.
As they worked, Clarissa’s fervor returned, until it would have seemed to a stranger that she was maddened by this knowledge of the treasure’s closeness at hand: and they worked into the night, excavating wandering ditches around the wagon, waist-deep waterless moats that were only slightly concentric, and which would have appeared from above more like the ladder-sticking of chromosomes, or the bent and groping thready arms of bacilli, than any plan or pattern.
Around midnight, exhausted, but having found nothing else (Clarissa still refused to believe a bride would travel across the desert with a four-horse team and a trunk full of golden goblets; there had to be more skeletons, and more treasures), they lifted the bride carefully down from the wagon and set her off in the dunes at some distance and then tore apart the wagon for firewood, which they burned to stay warm.
They slept in each other’s arms, for warmth and for the taste of the sweetness of the summer that was going away from them forever now, the firelight flickering on their faces; and throughout the night Richard kept getting up
and breaking off more firewood. And when the wagon and its wheels and axles were all burned (the steel wagon rims glowing in the night), he unfastened the skeletal horses from their yokes and harnesses as if turning them free, and burned the old leather, hardened and black as driftwood: and in that burning, the salt and minerals from a century ago, dry-caked from the horses’ laboring backs, burned brightly in sputtering flames of silver and green, burning so hot that it melted the sand in their fire pit, shaping it as would the heat of a glass blower’s torch into a perfect bowl, one which would years hence hold rainwater, on the brief occasions when a storm swept across the desert, and when the vagaries of the dunes had conspired to leave the glassine bowl exposed that day, rather than buried beneath fifty feet of sand and time.
And on those occasions, the desert creatures—collared lizards and desert kit foxes, coyotes and kangaroo rats—would come to the old fire pit and sip from that crystalline bowl, and then the sand would sweep back in like the tide and cover it all back up again.
The stench of the burning leather was what awakened Clarissa, just before dawn. In her dreams, she imagined that the odor was coming from her own skin, and even after she awakened, she could not shake that sensation; and like one who in the morning regrets deeply the dim memory of the night-before’s revelry, upon awakening she no longer had any interest in pursuing either the treasure or the uncompleted story of their excavation, and was instead only in a panic to get back home before the heat of the sun returned: as anxious for that goal now as she had been for the discovery of more treasure the day before.
As if she had aged thirty or forty years in a single night.
The horses, free of their harnesses, had fallen over into loosened pieces of bone, as if the parts had been emptied carelessly from a large burlap sack, so disassembled now that even the idea of a horse seemed impossible.
Richard hefted the trunk of goblets onto his back, and Clarissa went over to the bride and shredded the tattered wedding dress, wrapping the gauze of it around her arms and neck, and also fashioned a crude veil.
She hoisted her parasol, and picked up the empty picnic basket, and together they hurried across the warming desert, Clarissa crying not so much from the pain of her sunburn as from the fear of its consequences; weeping at the realization of what she had done to her own precious and beloved skin.
Her skin passed quickly through all the stages of brown, and on into a blackness of char. Richard took her home and wrapped her in ice, lining her sheets with it as he might a gigantic fish that he had captured, and which he intended to keep alive a bit longer.
He stayed with her as long as possible, each night and day, during the times he did not need to be out at the rigs. When her pain was too intense, he carried her into the bathroom and laid her down in a tub of cold water and let the hose trickle water over her; and her father, who knew the pharmacist in town, was able to get morphine sulfate for her, under the condition that she use the pills only once a day.
The relief from the medication lasted but one or two hours, and the rest of a day’s and night’s measure was spent swimming through waves of pain: the crests torturous, and the troughs sweeter, if only by a fraction, with the dreams and memory of the last medication, and the nearing arrival of the next.
Her body, full of toxins, and with some of her flesh cooked and deadened, swelled so much that the blackened skin split in places, bursting like a hot dog left untended on a campfire grill. Richard and her parents took turns bathing these new wounds, each one as deep as the mud cracks in a gone-away pond, and these cleansings raised the scope or scale of her pain, until her twitching nerves and synapses were so frayed that her mind confused pain with pleasure; and as they tended to her she would sometimes smile and even croon a small song that at first they perceived to be cautionary, warning them to leave her alone to her delirium, but which came eerily to seem like what it was, confused or misplaced pleasure.
One day between wells and burn dressings, Richard took the goblets out to Herbert Mix’s museum, where they were received with greater enthusiasm than Richard could have hoped for. Part of what made them so attractive to Mix, Richard knew, was the story of double travail that was now attached to them—not just the mysterious desert bride who had perished while transporting them, but the ruination—or so it was feared—of beauty.
Alarmed by the possible interest of other bidders, Mix borrowed from the bank the goblets’ full value in gold and then tripled that number, so that he could purchase the collection as well as the story and its provenance, and ended up committing $35,000 for the purchase. (In the end it was he who was ruined; Clarissa’s skin healed, and within six months the scars were unnoticeable, whereas Herbert Mix was never again able to climb out of debt; and after his death, some ten years later, a museum in Dallas was able to purchase the goblets, and the tatters of wedding dress, for one-tenth their original price.)
Clarissa almost broke. Or rather, she broke several times inside, as her skin began to crust in dark flakes and dust, and as the splits began to form scabs. She felt more reptilian than the oldest woman in town, and the irony was not lost on her: now that she had the money to leave town, there was no reason to do so. It was Richard, sunburned and with callused hands, who would be slipping away, while she remained behind, like some rock or stone sunken in a pond.
She dreamed of the lake and the cabin he had never yet dared mention to her—his own one damaged dream still held secret not like a card unplayed but like a map made on a scrap of folded paper and carried around for years, examined again and again until its lines are so known to the dreamer that it is as if the life has already been lived. But in Clarissa’s own dreams, when she entered that cabin, it was not hers, nor was there ever anyone inside.
In her twisting, fevered sleep, she passed on by the cabin, and traveled farther, toward the unknown approbation of strangers, and toward a sound she perceived to be distant waves of applause—for what, she never quite knew, only that in the dream she turned in that direction; and as the splits and scabs slowly healed and the waves of pain flattened out, she no longer had the dream of the lit lakeside cabin in the woods.
Still, when she came back up out of the illness, it seemed that she had traveled far; and while she recognized the faces of those around her, she knew also that she had somehow been carried past them, and that in her absence, Richard too had traveled some distance.
For once, they had gotten out ahead of it, rather than being left behind.
Someone meek would have been tempted to pull into an eddy and wait for the current to catch up, or even to climb out onto shore and wander into the forest for a short distance, idle and blessed, waiting.
Instead, they kept traveling.
She touched the ridged scars on her arms and the back of her neck, and upon her face. An old woman in town told her that if she laid spider webs across them there would be no scars, and so each morning Richard and her parents went looking for spider webs, and brought them tangled and insubstantial to her, placing them on the worst skin-cracks. And inside herself, after having broken but not having admitted to anyone that she had broken, Clarissa determined to become a model, or an actress, regardless—whether her recovery left her with no scars or a thousand.
Because she did not have the courage to turn back, she substituted with resolve. It was all almost the same thing. She tried in her everyday conversations to keep secret from others her new knowledge and self-awareness—the almost unbearable acuity of the tiny space between courage and endurance, between determination and hope.
Richard could see it about her, however, and he wondered what she would do with that new perception. With a grace beyond his years, he made no effort to detain her, but let her flow on past: and he felt, too, that in some way he had already captured her, and that at some unknown level she would always be his, and he, hers.
He kept going out into the saltbush around town in the mornings, looking for spider webs, as did many others from town. The best way to tr
ansport the webs was to press them between sheets of cardboard; and at any point in the day, cars and trucks were driving up to her house, and passengers were getting out and carrying armloads of pressed cardboard and leaving them on the porch; and for the rest of the townspeople’s lives, or those who had gathered the spider webs during the time of her illness, they would rarely be able to see a web without remembering that brief period in their lives when they had united to make pilgrimages to beauty; and of how, like a miracle, it had worked: of how Clarissa’s skin had recovered completely, void of even a single scar, and of how she had gone on to continue being a flawlessly beautiful woman, by any account in the world.
All summer long, Richard’s drilling success had been only average; but now that Clarissa had released him, as he had released her, his success improved. He knew this could be only an illusion, for each well location had already been decided far in advance, with Richard having plotted and selected the drill site long before he ever set foot on that landscape—but still, so dramatic was the change following Clarissa and Richard’s letting-go that it was hard not to believe that there was some deeper partnership, unknown to the dreamers and participants, but existing nonetheless with foreordinance more omnipotent than the rigidity and fractured shiftings of the bedrock of the earth itself, the platey, labored movements of the groaning layers of stone. It was possible, Richard imagined, that this partnership would exist with equal dominance into the future as well.
In the last few weeks of his work in the Odessa oilfields, the ground began to cave in—gaping sump holes imploding, the skin of the earth collapsing in dozens of places each night. The belief among the townspeople was that in pumping so much oil out from beneath the ground over the last fifty years, entire caverns had been emptied; the subterranean earth had become dry and brittle, and had finally collapsed in on itself.
Such a phenomenon had never occurred or been noted anywhere else, but neither had such a volume of oil ever been extracted from such shallow depths, nor so extensively from limestone formations. The geologists and field personnel in town denied any responsibility, even though most of the sumps had occurred within a few hundred yards of an active field—but because the industry employed most of the town, there was little formal complaint; nor could anyone see much harm coming from the pits.
