by Rick Bass
The land had already long ago been made nearly useless by overgrazing—one rancher had half a dozen cattle trapped for days in one of the larger sump holes, which was roughly the size of a football field; the rancher did not discover the sump, nor his herd, until the third day, by which time the cattle were weak with thirst, some lying on their sides, and he had to quickly build a ramp and scaffolding and lead them back up and out to safety.
Another rancher, an old drunkard, claimed that he had lost his best bull down one of the crevices that appeared overnight on his ranch. He claimed that he had put his ear to the ground and heard the bull bellowing down there. A neighbor went forty feet down, with a rope tied around his waist, before being unable to go any farther, but found no bull, nor any sign of the bull’s passage.
Some of the pits and sump holes would go on to become hypersaline lakes, their bottoms coated with an alkali hardpan, the density of which increased with each evaporation, so that although for the first few months the sump holes had been capable of holding water and attracting life, they quickly became toxic, killing the birds and mammals that came to their shores to drink, the evidence unmistakable in the residue of skeletons encircling the newly formed salt-shining basins, with the smaller animals dying but a few steps from the shore, and the larger ones managing to travel some farther distance; though in the end they too perished while still within sight of the lake, their arms and legs and wings and necks craned back in the direction from which they had traveled, as if to stare with disbelief at the betraying landscape: the thing that had presented itself as being able to provide succor to them turning upon them instead to be the device of their death.
When the sump holes first began appearing, some of the residents had immediate surges of water pressure in their wells, so that after years of decline, the hydrostatic levels rose all the way up the well casings and blew the lids off the well covers, water splashing onto the desert and then spreading in the night—flowing now like an artesian well blessed by some holy person.
Many of the wells were contaminated, during the collapse—oil and saltwater drilling fluids mixing with formations that had previously been kept separate. As a result, their water now had an iridescent sheen to it, and an oily taste and odor; but many residents were so pleased with the increase in volume that they quickly got used to the taste, and there were several among them who commented that the new inadvertent additive had made them more regular.
The oil companies denied any link between their overproduction and the collapses at the surface, and denied also the films and ribbons of oil that were beginning to appear in the drinking water. When the transport pipelines broke and leaked oil into the soil, they denied that too, simply patched the leak and then covered up the spill with new dirt.
Clarissa cashed the check from the sale of the goblets and left town the same day that Richard departed, leaving even as he asked her to stay and live the dream of the life at the lake; leaving after he humiliated himself and her both by pleading for her to believe in it, or to at least try it.
They drove out to the train station before daylight. He helped her board the 6:05 to Dallas, and watched, disbelieving—time for only one quick murmured endearment—as she climbed on, stone-faced, as if no pain could or ever would touch her anywhere; as if, now that it was over, none of it had ever mattered—and then the train was gone, and there was once more only a brilliant space in the desert where the train had once been, the space through which it had briefly passed. Richard got back in his truck and drove south and east, back to the Gulf, and out of the world.
He left behind a barren, sinking landscape and traveled back toward the ocean, drawn as if by his own tide, and possessing the worst scar of all—the scar of quitting, of not being able to go on any further—the death of dreams—and little by little, his once strange and powerful heart grew smaller.
He had helped despoil the landscape, even if unwittingly, puncturing it until it deflated, before leaving to return to Houston, to a life of increasing hesitancy and moderation—having failed hard at love and deciding thereafter not to pursue a subsequent attempt, some part of him understanding he could not withstand another failure. And without realizing it, he had helped ensnare her, for even as she perceived that she was escaping—had escaped—she carried in her the weeks-old seed of incautious foreplay: not quite an immaculate conception, but close to it.
A child conceived out of the ashes of her own body, forming even as her new skin formed, and with the child two months in her before she first dared to suspect that her periods, which had always been erratic, had been missed not as the result of her skin’s injury, but instead because another had captured her after all.
She nearly climbed out of her own skin with revulsion—not at the child, but at herself—when the test confirmed her fears, and she cursed Richard, believing the pregnancy had been a trap to keep her from running, then cursed herself, believing that there must have been some fatal flaw within her that had desired to be trapped all along.
She lived in misery for months, unwilling to terminate the child—believing it to be a life separate from hers—and though her dreams of physical beauty were ruined, she was still the same person inside, unwilling or unable to draw close, or to allow others to come close: and rather than embracing her fear, she made the decision to give the child, whom she would name Anne, up for adoption.
Her parents had moved to Florida, for which she was glad, and she sat in her new apartment in Dallas, which was where unwed mothers from her hometown had always ended up, and with each day she was astounded by all that she had lost. She showed no talent for being able to look forward and consider that the child might be a blessing.
As in Odessa, she preferred to sleep as much as she could in the day, and move about at night. She got a job as a dispatcher for a moving and storage company, in which she was able to stay indoors, and then a better-paying job as a nurse’s assistant at a hospital in Fort Worth, where her luminous beauty was sometimes the first thing to greet the injured, or the sick and the dying, as they were wheeled inside.
And yet such was her detachment, as her term grew, that other patients would sometimes glance at her and think that she too was a patient, despite her uniform, one who had just checked in to receive the best care for her unborn child.
At the hospital, it was easy to find professional if not spiritual advice. Despite having no affection for the child growing inside her, she in no way wanted it to grow up in such a backwater as Odessa, though neither did she want it in a big city, nor did she want it near her. An ultrasound had determined that it was a girl, and although one of the physicians had indicated he could help place the child with a couple who would be willing to reimburse Clarissa for her troubles, she declined the offer, thinking that if she were to profit from the baby, she might as well offer it to Herbert Mix, who could chain it in his garage and sell tickets.
In the end, she went with a church orphanage, another backwater place she had never seen, but which if she had would have given her second thoughts about Odessa—and she never wavered from her decision, not even in the last days, though after the pain and effort of the delivery (the child was not allowed to nurse), when she looked down between her legs at the spaceling that was already being wrapped and lifted slippery-glistening away, red and jerky in its movements, with an entire lifetime before it, she felt bereft. But then the nurse was gone, lingering only for a moment in the doorway to blot some of the afterbirth from the baby, and the door closed, and Clarissa was alone in the room with the doctor and another nurse, and they set about preparing her for her recovery.
For nearly a year, she felt free, believed herself to be fully on the path she had been dreaming of or desiring all her life. She switched to the day shift and became involved with a community theater group, and entertained various suitors, being boxed in at first, but choosing ultimately a lover who would not tie her down, a leading man with no fidelity to her, only desire—and it was this second world, the lo
ng evening rehearsals and the ascent into fantasy, that became most alive for her, while the hospital days became a lowermost kind of sleeping world for her.
She tensed when she saw babies in public, newborns, and told herself the silent mantras: It’s all worked out for the best, and I wasn’t cut out to be a good mother, and I wasn’t ready to be a mother, and even I’m sure she’s in a loving home.
Our Town; The Tempest; Guys and Dolls; Bus Stop. Her lover’s name was Oscar. When he asked where she was from, she told him Houston.
Clarissa had seen melanoma before, in some of the patients that came through the hospital: old-woman gardeners, old-man lifelong tractor-drivers from the outlands, as well as middle-aged slack-skinned lifeguards, their arms and the backs of their necks riddled with the cancers that foretold their soon-to-be shadowy wasting away as surely as any biblical smear of blood left on their doors in the night; and when her own first appeared—showing up on her cheek not like any illness but instead merely a birthmark, a beauty mark, rising darkly through her creamy skin like a fish swimming from the depths of a clear lake and then pausing just beneath the surface—she was not frightened, nor, strangely, did she even find the mark unattractive. And the doctors, knowing nothing of the exposure she had encountered out in the dunes, were likewise lulled by the mark’s beauty—if anything, it seemed to help draw into focus more quickly the admirer’s glance—and when they mentioned it at all, they indicated that it was likely an aftereffect of childbearing.
She did not last the year, dying quickly, the enucleated damage within her multiplying rapidly, consuming her exactly in the manner of a fire. She was rushed through crude chemo and radiation therapies, which only fed the fire within her; and within months was unrecognizable even to herself.
She tried to get in touch with Richard, but couldn’t find him. He had quit his job, someone said, when she called the company for whom he’d worked in Houston, and had gone down into Mexico, traveling; and as she was dying, she was haunted by the idea that the speed of her passing was related directly to the resistance she had put up against the world: to Richard, to the sun’s rays, to her place of birth, to her own child—and on her worst days, which were frequent, she was glad that the child would never know that about her, and prayed that the child would move in an opposite direction, as she knew sometimes happened, and be open to the world.
It was the worst realization of all to understand one day that her greatest mistake had been in trying to build a life completely absent of mistakes: though in the end, there was at least some grace in that understanding, and she held on to it and pondered it long days and nights, as if she might yet somehow receive a second chance.
4
1933
SOME THREE DECADES BEFORE Richard had danced with Clarissa on the bare salt flats near the shore of Juan Cordona Lake, dancing as if to summon more life itself, or to resurrect the past, there had been another young couple in whom love had attempted to reach its roots, setting tendrils in that brilliant, searing, salty landscape.
Marie’s father had been an orchardkeeper to the north, along the upper reaches of the Colorado. There was no reason to believe that Marie would be sucked down into the wasteland of salt to the south. Given her childhood in the orchard, among the peaches and pears, almost anyone might have predicted that Marie’s life would be filled with blessings and affirmations.
She had been loved by both parents, loved by her brothers and sisters, attended a one-room schoolhouse. Even during times of hardship, her family and her community had had plenty to eat. She knew the love of her family and of the community, and then, as a young woman in the first year of courtship, she had known the love of a hardworking young man, Max Omo, whom she married at the end of that same first year, with the wedding held late in the breezy springtime, out in the orchards, while the blossoms blew loose from the trees, flashing through the sky like the scales of fish and catching in the hair of the wedding guests.
Marie had never heard of Odessa, nor had Max, at the time, but it was where they found themselves headed, shortly after the marriage. If Marie had been able to choose her own life, she would have envisioned the two of them staying in North Texas, working in the orchards, building a stone cottage, raising children. When she imagined their future, she pictured it as being filled always with the swirling scented petals of fruit blossoms, flashing white and pink through a blue sky.
Marie had loved Max Omo—his quiet, earnest, and even tender hardworking ways—but once those qualities began to vanish, it bothered her that she was unable to assign blame: unsure, always, of whether some harsher, inner core of his had begun to ultimately emerge, as if in some discouraging metamorphosis, or if it was the waterless land itself that hardened his tenderness, transforming it into something different.
But even there, in Odessa, love had prospered, for a short while.
They had rented a small house; Max took a job working in the grocery. They had joined the church; Marie had borne a son. She’d had friends. Max had begun to investigate the possibility of opening his own place of business in town. He was itchy, anxious for physical labor. He felt imprisoned by the absence of it.
They lived four houses down from the strange museum of Herbert Mix.
The heat was astonishing, and she had never seen a sun so fierce and bright. It began blazing early in the morning, and by midday, the streets and buildings were so illuminated that they shimmered. It seemed to Marie as if the town had already been received into a celestial afterlife. The colorless sky, in the full heat of summer, and the town, in the reflected whitewash of its buildings, was every bit as white as the ivory piles of spent orchard blossoms that blew in wind-drifts up against the sides of her house when she was a child.
For the first year, it was as if the harsh land had not yet even noticed them; as if they had arrived and tamed and mastered it through their dreams alone. As if no physical work would be required—only longing and desire.
Eighteen thousand years earlier, the glaciers that had once blanketed most of the sleeping continent were beginning to recede, leaving as their residue a detritus of moraine, time-smoothed boulders in the shape of human skulls; and though the glaciers had never quite reached the Pecos country, the cooling breath of their southerly exhalation had been enough to influence the local weather to the extent that a cool forest of fir, spruce, and pine had extended around the shore of Juan Cordona Lake.
The nomadic hunter-gatherers made lean-tos and rock cairns to shield themselves against the north winds; and at night, their warming fires flickered through the unchinked seams of the stacked rocks, so that to an observer from a later time, it could have seemed that the fire-sitters were not hunkered in front of a loose campfire, but instead housed in some warm foursquare structure. The stars glinted in perfect reflection on the dark mirror of the cold lake and burned in the tops of the dark conifer forest like decorations or ornaments.
After a few thousand years the world grew warmer, killing the spruce and pines, but cultures continued to wear footpaths to and from the lake, scraping salt from the shore and cutting blocks of it to use as a preservative for buffalo meat. Dogs pulled their sleds, and then, beginning in the sixteenth century, they used horses traded and stolen from the Spaniards, during that country’s futile dreams of riches and conquest.
The residents of the new desert, the Jumano Indians, fought with the Apaches for control of the lake—as if there were not enough to share, and as if unable to conceive or understand that the salt kept replenishing itself; that the sun itself was what continued to pull the salt to the surface.
By the late seventeenth century, when Captain Juan Domínguez de Mendoza—related to the Spanish Viceroy who over a hundred years earlier had helped finance Cortés’s search for gold and silver and the Seven Cities of Cíbola—encountered the lake, he found that numerous trails and roads had been developed, leading to it.
He called them caminos, or streets, and noted how they were curbed with white stones, so tha
t a traveler could follow, even on a moonless night, these time-honored paths toward the same and final destination.
Finding no gold or silver—after over two hundred years of slaughter and mayhem—the Spaniards finally turned, as had every culture before them, to the ground itself, and began gnawing at the glittering salt.
As Spain helped encourage the northward colonization of Mexico through a series of garrisons and missions—the ancient march of soldiers and priests, occupying increasingly marginal agricultural lands—most of the disputes took place not between Indians and salt traders, but among the traders themselves, with the driver of one ox-pulled carreta finding himself insulted by the driver of another. It was not only the lakeshore that was littered with the bones of humanity, but the trail back to Mexico: the whitening bones of the salt traders drying flyblown in the desert next to the caminos’ stones and boulders—as if each skeleton had belonged to an individual whose last and highest purpose in life had been, in death, to help pave and point the way to the lake, so that others of his kind could continue with similar travels.
At night, in the traders’ camps, their carts would be arranged in a ring around a campfire of sage, piñon, and driftwood hauled up from the salt river of the Pecos. Rotgut tequila, crudely made and fiercely potent, would be drunk from clay jugs, and at the far edges of the wavering firelight, the oxen would remain standing, still in their traces.
