All the Land to Hold Us

by Rick Bass

  The houndsmen finally got the hounds pulled free of their quarry, and reattached to the trucks’ bumpers. The dogs were still euphoric; if left unregulated, they would have continued to gnaw at their great treasure until they succumbed to the heat and their own enthusiasms; and even after they were leashed and chained to the bumpers of the trucks again, they continued to lunge and snap at the air itself, biting and howling now at nothing but the distance between them and their quarry: and for the rest of their days, their dreams would be filled with the memories, the odors and tastes and sights, of this one chase; and, greedsome, they might wonder if even more glorious quarry than this existed, when only days earlier they would never have been able to imagine even this immense and splendid wonder.

  “What is wrong with you people?” the lead houndsman demanded of both Mufti and Max Omo. “We were only trying to help you find your damn elephant. We’ve just lost about three thousand dollars’ worth of dogs, chasing your damn elephant across hell and back.”

  Mufti was silent, chastened, but Max Omo bristled, ready to jump into the fight again. “He’s not my damn elephant. I see no good coming from him, and am just as happy to see him die as live”—but at this Mufti broke down in sobs, still jittery from the fighting, and implored them to try to save the animal.

  “I’ll pay for the dogs, if we can save him,” Mufti said. “In the salvation of your enemy lies your restitution,” he pleaded. “I stand before your mercy. Name your price.”

  “I’ll help you,” Max Omo said. “If you pay for the gas it took to come out here and back, and if you let my boys ride on that elephant in the circus, next time you come through.”

  “Me too,” Marie said. “I’d like to ride on it. The three of us. The four of us, if you want to, Max.”

  Max Omo stared at her, then shook his head. “No, it’ll just be the three of you.”

  “Fine,” Mufti said. “A parade. A celebration for the elephant’s saviors. We can all take turns riding on his back.” He nodded to the houndsmen. “All of us. You, your dogs, the children, Mrs. Omo, myself—he can carry all of us.”

  They were all silent, then, studying the catatonic mass. There was no sound save for the hounds’ plaintive whines and yelps.

  “You are the engineer,” Mufti said to Max Omo. “How can we get him into the river?”

  But Max Omo was already hunkered on his heels, studying on it: watching the horseflies settling themselves into the crusting red calligraphy that decorated the still-heaving hide.

  “Getting him into the river will be the easy part,” Max Omo predicted. “Getting him out, not so easy.”

  “I think once he cools down his power will return to him,” Mufti said. “He can leave the river on his own.”

  Max Omo turned to survey the limited machinery at hand. It did not seem fair to him that the elephant, in its infirmity, should weigh the same; by Omo’s accounting, it seemed that in his reduced state the elephant should be becoming lighter and more tractable by the minute, as his life and will drained away, and it alarmed Max Omo to realize that the opposite was true. It probably took a creature that size a year to die, he supposed, or longer; perhaps several years. Perhaps the elephant did not even know yet that it was dying.

  “He’s going to have to help us some,” he said. “If we just hook up to him with the chains and ropes and try to pull him to the river, the ropes will cut right through him.” He walked over closer to the elephant and looked into his eye, trying to gauge what resolve might remain, but had no real idea of how to measure such things. “If we wrap the chains around his tusks, will they come out?”

  Mufti winced. “They might.” He considered the problem himself. “Maybe around the back and under the shoulders, if we have that much rope and chain.”

  The houndsmen looked at one another like card players who, having been beaten badly all night, have come to the point where they need to decide whether to play one more hand or turn around and go home.

  They could not turn away. Even though down to four hounds, they could not quit. When would they ever have another chance at an elephant?

  They brought buckets of water from the river and doused their fiery hounds before shutting them up inside the back of the circus wagon, leaving the roll-up-curtain door cracked only enough to allow a thin siphon of fresh air. The dogs clawed briefly at the door before finally being overcome by the heat. They lay on their bellies on the hot floor of the truck with only their muzzles pressed through that little seam, sucking in through flared nostrils the sweeter outside air.

  The men laid their ropes and chains together and began fastening them into a pulley system, and with shovels began digging a small passageway beneath the elephant, in order that they might wrap the chain around him from below.

  Two trucks would pull from the front while the third pushed from behind. They would drag and shove the elephant as close to the river’s edge as possible, where he would then have to take but one or two final steps to tumble down the little bluff. They would have to work quickly to unfasten the ropes and chains when this happened, so that his plunge would not take the trucks and drivers with it.

  The boys continued excavating beneath the elephant, while the adults positioned the trucks and readied the ropes and chains.

  Marie kept going down to the river to haul up bucket after bucket of the silty water, which she poured on the elephant’s head, and on his wounds; but it was to little avail, for the water seemed to evaporate off of him in shimmering waves, as when one splashes droplets of water onto a too-hot skillet; and in the process, Marie soon began to overheat, and had to stop and drench herself, not the elephant, with the bucket of warm water.

  They each made dozens of trips, and through it all, the elephant gave no response, and finally Marie stopped, with her heart hammering and a crushing headache. She took refuge with the men in the hot shade of the trucks, from where they watched the boys dig.

  “You probably don’t want those little scoundrels to crawl all the way under,” one of the houndsmen counseled, “in case their tunnel collapses,” and so Max Omo got a piece of driftwood and fashioned it into a pole that could feed the chain and then gathered several more for the houndsmen to use as pry bars and levers.

  Max Omo considered the weight of the beast again, and the capabilities of their overheated machines, and said, “He’s going to have to help us. He’s going to have to want to get there.”

  Mufti went over and peered into the elephant’s motionless eye as if through a tiny peephole. “I don’t think he’s going to help,” Mufti said.

  With their first attempt, they merely got all three trucks stuck. The elephant did not budge, and seemed to hunker down into an even more unmanageable configuration, like some desert creature disappearing halfway into its burrow; and with their tires spinning in the sand, the trucks quickly buried themselves up to their frames, with tires and engines smoking, and the fumes of boiling, pressured sand burned back into glass beneath the roar and stink of their balding tires.

  Once again the boys were deployed, though they moved more slowly this time, and the men and Marie helped, clawing with their hands and scraps of wood and leaning into the trucks with pry bars of river-polished cottonwood, gleaming barkless spars that must have appeared to the elephant in his delirium like the tusks of his ancestors, gleaned from some terrible quarry just on the other side of the bluff.

  They got their trucks unstuck, paused to quaff more salty water, and set off into their labors once more, only to become stuck again immediately.

  There was nothing to do but dig out. Shards of crude and hastily manufactured black- and purple-streaked glass lay scattered in the sand all around them from where the spinning tires had churned out more silicon, some of it into the fantastic and intricate shapes of lizards, serpents, camels, and even, in one piece the boys noticed and picked up, an elephant with tusks—and in the flattening light of the slowly lowering sun the cast detritus appeared as so many diamonds or other jewels hurled ca
relessly from some vast treasure-place, or extraterrestrial objects rained down from the night sky, bits of melted star.

  As she walked through these shards, stopping to examine and sort through the glassine figures as might a walker on some seashore pause to look at seashells, Marie was reminded of the flakes of diamond-crust that had been furrowed upward in the wake of the elephant’s passage through her salt lake. In her own fatigued and fevered state, she wondered if it was in the nature of the elephant’s life to be attended thus, almost daily, with diamond-like detritus marking his path wherever he traveled; and she wondered what scent or residue or marker was her destined leaving; which story of hers would be told over and over again.

  Her loneliness in that moment was as inescapable as if in a vise.

  “It’s no use,” Max Omo said. “That creature isn’t going anywhere. Besides, we’ve got to rest the machines.” He idly kicked at a sheet of spun glass, fracturing it with a little tinkling sound that was strangely musical, and at odds with the barely restrained anger that rested just beneath him, sullen and dangerous as an eggplant-colored thundercloud.

  “We have to let the engines rest,” he said again, and then looked off at the sinking sun as if lamenting fiercely not merely the weight and cost of a lost day of work, but of some errant turn in life: as if all was now irretrievable, and that it was not one failed day that Max Omo was being forced to accept, but the template for some new pattern, some new way of being.

  Mufti and the houndsmen let him smolder, as if knowing that even a single sound would detonate him.

  They rested, and waited for his rage to bleed off as if in some synchrony with the setting of the boiling sun. They sat in the shade, drinking more salt water and smoking cigarettes, each of them becoming soothed gradually by the gurgling of the river below.

  As if against their wishes, a peacefulness began to steal in over them; and after a while, Mufti dared to petition the men for another chance, and when they only looked away and shook their heads in silent rejection, Marie scandalized them all by placing both of her hands on her husband’s bare sunburned arm in silent entreaty.

  Max Omo looked down at her browned hands upon his arm as if he had never before witnessed such tenderness or vulnerability. He glanced at his wife with both a scowl and confusion, then back at her hands; and clumsily, she pulled them away, feeling as if she were like nothing but the spun and ground and cast-out glass that lay scattered in the desert before them. (In his grubbings, some years later, Herbert Mix would find some of these strange and, to him, beautiful glassine fragments, like the broken pieces of elegant figurines, and he would examine them between his thumb and fingers, and would wonder, unable to form a story.)

  “I will pay you his full worth,” Mufti said, “if only he can be saved, tonight.”

  “He can’t be saved,” said Max Omo.

  Mufti paused, then renegotiated. “I will give you his full worth, whether he survives or not.”

  The houndsmen sat up a bit straighter at this offer, though they recognized also the ridiculous desperation in it, the womanly chords of heartstring.

  “You’d never raise that kind of money,” said one of the houndsmen.

  “I would try,” said Mufti. “I give you my word of honor as a gentleman.”

  “Shit, I bet you ain’t no gentleman,” said another of the houndsmen. “You’re circus folk.” Still, they readjusted their aching legs beneath them, as if willing now to try again: as biddable to the call of money as were their hounds to the music of the hunter’s horn.

  They turned their attention to Omo, waiting for his decision: knowing that neither their hounds nor their own imaginations would be nearly enough to salvage the great runaway; that the task could not be completed without him.

  Omo considered the brief flash of the money, as quick and yet distant as the pulses of summer heat lightning that danced every evening to the north and west—storms that in the summer had no chance of ever making it out onto the salt flats. He turned his gaze from the lightning and back toward some inner, uncompromising, untempted, dispassionate place; and watching the expression on his face, the houndsmen knew that he would agree to continue rescuing, or attempting to rescue, the elephant, and that he would accept no payment for his labor.

  There arose suddenly from the truck a mournful baying and howling from the hounds so strident and frenzied that even the least superstitious among the houndsmen, and even Max Omo himself, could not help but wonder for a moment if such unsolicited clamor was not protest against the unspoken decision to push ahead; as if the dogs had divined the shape of that desire, passing over their sleeping forms and waking them to full fury.

  The houndsman who had accused Mufti of not being a gentleman went over to the truck and rolled open the curtain door to shout at the hounds. The stench of their enclosure, and their befoulment—rank urine, heat-greasy feces, and regurgitated, putrefying meat—came rolling out in waves.

  The hounds were still leashed together, so that they could not leap free, though in the admission of new light and air to the zone of their imprisonment, the volume and intensity of their shrieking doubled yet again—and when Mufti, gagging, came over to see what had happened to the back of his truck, the houndsman clapped a hand on his back and advised, “Best to let it dry, cousin, then chip it away with a shovel in a couple or three days, otherwise it’ll be an awful mess.”

  He and another of his partners fastened a chain to the four dogs and jerked the hounds down to the river, keeping them clear of the elephant; and at the bluff, and on the count of three, they lifted the chain between them and hurled the whole assembly of dogs like a stringer of vile fish into the rapids, as if intending to drown them.

  Marie watched the darkened form of the elephant, which appeared to be sleeping—though she knew he was not; he was dying, not sleeping—and thought, If this is the hidden cost of a single circus, cloaked or veiled from any knowledge, what similar costs exist just beneath the surface of all other things, both the mundane and the magnificent?

  Once the men had the hounds hauled back to the top, the houndsmen allowed the hounds to wriggle on their backs in the sand, cleansing themselves, before the men loaded them into the back of the open-air truck and fastened them down in a way that even Marie, in the confused state of her fatigue, found surreal: an indecisive mix of harsh disciplinary punishment and loving, treasured attention.

  She made a low, moaning sound, but no one noticed.

  “We could try one more time, right now,” Mufti said, but Max Omo shook his head emphatically.

  “You can stay here with him if you want,” he said, “but we have to get these machines home, and oil and rest them. We will be back after midnight. We can bring you some food and water, if you want. It’ll be about six hours before we’re back.”

  Mufti studied the houndsmen, wondering whether to stay with his dying elephant or travel on with them, to help goad and turn them back toward the chore at hand, near midnight. He walked over to the elephant and placed his hand on its face, between the unseeing eyes. He thought of the weakness in all men, then—perhaps not in Max Omo, but in all others; certainly he was familiar with such weakness in himself—and with no trouble at all envisioned a scene in which, once back at the lake, well-fed and watered, a subtle alteration in plans might develop, if not an absolute mutiny.

  The rescuers, exhausted, might nap a little too long, or simply slip or drift off out of sight, never to be seen again. Max Omo, once back in the familiar embrace of his work, might recover his good senses, and leave the elephant, which meant nothing to him, to die, and leave Mufti, like all the other weak and foreign strangers of the world, to fare for himself.

  If they did not get the elephant to water that night, he would die. He would not survive even a few more hours of the next day’s sunlight.

  “I’ll ride back with you,” Mufti said, stepping away from the elephant, which was still radiating heat. Mufti wondered if there had been damage to the animal’s enormo
us brain. He wondered if, were he even to survive, the elephant would still be able to do his little tricks.

  Before leaving, he went back over to the elephant and spoke to it quietly. Tears glistened on Mufti’s face as he spoke. The houndsmen looked away, disgusted, and Marie felt a sudden franticness in her heart—as intense as the feeling she got when the dunes swept in over her cabin and she was buried beneath the sand—and she wondered, barely able to breathe as she considered it, what it would be like to be loved by such a man.

  They rode in caravan back toward the lake—Max Omo and Marie and the boys alone in their truck—the boys asleep, Max Omo watching intently the gauges on the instrument panel for signs of flutter or weakness, and Marie thinking about the way Mufti’s tears had rolled down his face that was the color of butter heated almost to a scorch.

  And each of the travelers, in their different vehicles, even the houndsmen, felt varying degrees of remorse and regret, and admiration for the heart of the beast they were abandoning; and in his vehicle, Mufti kept weeping, and in hers, Marie rode leaning forward, mouth slightly open, as if stunned, staring at the emergence of the desert’s night stars, and marveling at both their distance and their proximity.

  The stars fell regularly, as they did every night, and in the desert like that, there was very much the temptation to stop the truck and get out and go seeking the nearer ones, which appeared to have fallen only over the next dune.

  6

  AT THE OMOS’ HOME, men and beasts drank quart after quart of newly hauled brine water. The men stood around the well like animals at a trough, taking turns hauling the oaken buckets upward and drinking it dry before handing it to the next man, each of whom was responsible for gathering only his own, and then, after they were all sated, each for his hound; and as the men stood around the shaft of the well, recounting the strange events of the day, Marie built a fire in the cookhouse and began slicing strips of mutton for both the men and the hounds, and frying eggs; and she opened a bottle of the white wine from their wedding.