by Rick Bass
It would be a trial run for Marie, the church workers explained. They would observe her for a week, then evaluate her for whatever tasks she might be fitted for with regard to the service of the church, and the earning of her keep.
The boys and Max Omo gave her clumsy, salt-odored, diesel-fuel embraces. They said something to her, perhaps something poignant or tender or meaningful, though it was heard by no one, for the only sounds she heard from them when they opened their mouths was the grating, rattling roar of the barrel tube; though after they had turned and left her, she noticed that a silence returned to her room, the first such silence she could remember hearing: and with the white walls of the unfurnished apartment before her—a cot, a sink, two windows, no curtains, no mirror—she felt freedom onrushing, carrying her away to safety.
She felt it as strongly as if she had been in a small canoe on a rushing river and had come to a fork in its path, and had chosen the river’s smaller, quieter, backwater braid, and had been rewarded finally in that choosing.
A stellar calm and quietness. The rich odor of all the living things rising from the gentle slough. The sound of the water dripping from the blade of her paddle held motionless above the little backwater river as she drifted, surrounded by all-else silence: her silence, and nobody else’s.
The sounds of the world returning slowly, then, along with their sights. The one guttural croak of a great blue heron, the color of fog, leaping up from the graveled shore and pulling himself up into the sky like a magician before flying away, each single wingbeat seeming to carry him farther than one would have thought possible—each slow wingbeat against the sky like the one-stroke of her own paddle, taking her farther down the little river, the forgotten and hidden river, her river.
In her mind, she reached down and collected the prettier stones, carried them on with her farther downriver in the canoe before setting them on the shore beside her when she made her camp for the night on a secluded gravel bar, tended by a small campfire as much for companionship as warmth; sleeping then to the sound of the murmuring river right beside her, a bower of scented branches beneath her for a cushion, and a blanket over her for warmth.
A morning swim in the river, a bath, and she was off, carrying those few best stones with her, and collecting more the next day—and when she returned to her apartment, she would bring the stones from that trip with her and place them on top of the dresser that was not yet there in her apartment, stones from a trip she had not yet taken and might never take: but no matter, she was in a clean, dry, comfortable place that was fully her own, the silence was her own and no one else’s, history had already passed by, there was no need any longer to struggle with or battle against it.
She went over to one of the old windows and opened it to the height of its sash and leaned against the fresh-painted white of her bare walls and stared out at the sleepy comings and goings of the town, her new life, below; and in the coming days, the church workers could discern no problems, no failings, illnesses, or imbalances within her, and after first assigning her to the cleanup detail, she was soon promoted to full kitchen duties. By the end of the autumn, she had been fully embraced by and incorporated into the church, with its underlying gridwork and support system of endless potluck dinners and prayer lists, its sermons and lectures. The church members welcomed her with the zeal of the starving—as if with their opportunity to be kind to and supportive of her—even perhaps rescuing her, as was sometimes intimated had happened—they were consuming her, and were wild to do so.
She never engaged her heart in the full passion of the message of the church that had adopted her—she was too chary, too ravenous herself for the delicious new freedom, and the dreams of the little river, and the freedom of the bare clean white walls of her loft. Her heart remained only her own, like some wild animal even when among them, kept housed and out of their hungry reach as if in a small cage of bamboo bars.
And somehow, as if understanding this about her, and perhaps even slightly admiring of it, the church did not demand her heart, for they were only too grateful to have the opportunity to serve her, and to project upon her their needs and desires, and their own images of helping-selves—in this regard, they subtly, craftily sought to imprison her, even up in the freedom of that loft above the town—but they were easy to elude, compared to the years spent with her husband and sons; and whenever she felt panicked or enclosed, she was almost always able to slip away merely by placing her fingertips against one of those bare white walls, which she kept fresh-painted and clean-scrubbed, across the years.
And in the first year, when she thought occasionally of Max Omo and the boys, and of the scorpions and sandstorms and hot salt water, it was with a dizzying combination of elation and regret; but after those first four seasons, she thought of them almost hardly at all, and on the one or two times each year she might encounter them in town (the boys as large and passionless as heifers, now), she usually looked through them without even realizing who they were—and even when something in her clicked, and reminded her of who they were, or who they had once been, she still could not make the full connection.
And in looking at them—staring at them as they walked down the sidewalk on the other side of the street—it was for her as if she were viewing them through a riffling sheen of clear water, as she had stared intently in some of her visions at the blurry then clear passage of polished stones beneath her as the river, and her little canoe, carried her along.
She helped out in the church—filing books in the library, babysitting during services. A calmness came back into her life, if not a strength or enthusiasm. In the evenings she would return to her loft attic and, after preparing a simple meal on her two-burner stove, she would sit by the window like a cat and look out at the slow goings-on in the little town.
The football players rushing past, cleats pounding the pavement. The oilfield service trucks, as if on their way to some critical military engagement. The young people, occasionally walking down the sidewalks, heads down, new in love. Some of the young women were beautiful. What would it be like, she wondered once—not desiring it, only trying to imagine it—to possess such beauty?
The other Omos lasted but a few more years without her; and those years were even shoddier than before, in which Omo and his boys were plagued by bad luck and poor business decisions, increased physical clumsiness, slovenliness, malnutrition, and, gradually, a general inattentiveness to their subject, the salt, so that soon it became apparent to the boys that Max Omo was only going through the motions: not pining for Marie, certainly, but seeming somehow gutted nonetheless; and they missed the old days of groove and synchrony, when the salt had risen each day, and they had been there to meet it, and for a while had been its equal.
Now the lake swelled, dominating its weakened and imbalanced former oppressors, and as the salt miners’ production dwindled, the lake’s salt rose in small folds and ridges that accumulated in patterns similar to those in the sand dunes.
The lake had always before been planar, as level as cut or shaved ice, but now it began to look haggard, and when Max Omo went down to the shore in the evenings to stare out at it, he no longer stood as he once had, but sat in an old chair smoking a cigarette; and where once he had gazed intently at the lake, he now saw nothing, and thought nothing, only sat and rested, waiting.
And of the salt they did manage to continue producing, in ragged fits and starts, they had increasing difficulty selling it, and then even giving it away. Low transportation costs and large companies working on both the Gulf Coast and in the desert Southwest were taking over all the old markets, though still Max Omo and the boys continued to produce the salt, almost frantic now that the only thing they knew how to do well in the world was no longer sufficient to keep them afloat.
And whether the neurosis ran in their blood or came trickling up from out of the ground, to then be shaped and directed by the wind, they could not know, but both boys began to notice that the lake was expanding, creeping inwar
d with a subtle but noticeable steadiness, so that by the next spring the legs of the chair in which Max Omo sat smoking his cigarettes in the evening were eventually several inches into the lake: and still he did not move the chair back, but sloshed out toward it each evening in his rubber boots, and sat there slouched and exhausted in the blue dusk, the end of his cigarette glowing as he pulled on it, as if that lone spark now was all that sustained him, and perhaps even all of the world in motion around him: as if it were all but one spark away from freezing solid, as lifeless as stone.
And in the same manner that their mother had once lain awake nightly, listening for the approach of the winding, slinking sand, the boys—fifteen and seventeen, now—lay there and wondered and imagined how much ground the lake might be gaining on them each evening. They began to develop tics and stutters, jerks and twitches; and only in their work were their fears and troubles able to be absorbed.
The barrel tube broke down, as did one trawl line after another, and there was no money to fix the machinery, and then no money for gas. For a while they sorted the salt by hand, drying it and shaking it through large sieves, but once they realized they would not be selling any more salt, there was no longer any need to sort it, and they grew even more haphazard in their harvest and their storage, working now only with big shovels, simply piling the sludge in great heaps all around the edge of the lake.
Their well began to go dry, recharging more slowly, and with greater salinity each time—when they sweated now, they could feel the salt pushing its way through their pores, as if seeking to return to the lake. It seemed that the salt in their sweat was comprised now of coarser and coarser crystals, so that the once-pleasurable act of perspiring was now painful—and as the heated winds dried their skin almost immediately, the evaporating perspiration left salt crusts everywhere upon them, gritty as sand, so that to anyone who would have observed them, they would have appeared to be creatures made of salt.
Their well went completely dry, and Max Omo went sixty feet down into it, and was shoveling the salt out bucket by bucket, searching for one more seam of fresh water, and attempting to deepen the well, when the salt—as if, patient all his life, had only now become eager for him—shifted slightly, the shaft filling in on itself and swallowing him as if the bore hole had become a gullet; and though he had a rope fastened to him, and the boys above pulled and pulled, they couldn’t raise him, and then the rope broke.
They went and got their shovels and began working, trying to find and clean out the well shaft, but it was four days before they reached the old water level, and they were not quite in the bore of the old hole, and had no idea whether their entombed father lay preserved to the north or south of them, nor even if he lay deeper still, or if they had passed him by, and he was floating somewhere in the salt above them.
They had been taking turns, hauling out bucket after bucket, as if carving out the marrow of a living earth; but now, down around the sixty-foot level, and without the reinforcement of timbers and spars, the salt began trying to flow back in over them too, so that they had to exit.
They constructed a cairn of old truck wheels and axles, old rusting cogs and gears, to mark the spot (within ten years, the salt had completely eaten that iron, leaving not even the whispers of clues), and they fled.
One went to work in the oilfields of East Texas, laboring to help drill shallow wells on the flanks of some of the old anticlines. He died of liver cirrhosis at the age of forty in a three-dollar-a-night hotel room outside Beaumont, and his last conscious thoughts were of the evening the elephant had come through, and of the excitement of pursuing it—the hounds baying, the men leaning into the great animal with driftwood pry bars, the multicolored campfire, and the small, quiet, strange foreigner—and of being below the elephant, digging with his brother, when the sand began to trickle past, the ledge collapsing, and someone shouting for them to get out of the way . . .
The other went north to Chicago, to work in the meatpacking industry, utilizing his great strength, which would stand him in good stead yet another twenty years before he, too, vanished from history, less than an asterisk, disappearing as Richard would: like seed-drift.
Neither of the boys ever saw their mother again, and in their wake, years later, young boys on the town’s football team, almost men, continued to thunder down the streets of town, galloping like wild horses, perspiring, glorying in the quick breath of the brief strength, a strength not unlike that which the Omos had once possessed—a strength whose fullness had not even been reached yet: running each morning, pulling a wagon loaded with an orchestra, charging out of the dawn as if released from behind some gates or portals hidden deep within the earth; as if these children, only these and no others, had been waiting forever to be let out, and to storm the world with their power and quickness—almost giddy with the fierce belief that anything they did mattered. As if all the generations before them, the strata of dry bones, was but a rampart building for this generation, the true and important one—the living one.
BOOK TWO
8
Mexico, or Underworld
1967–1975
AFTER LOSING CLARISSA, Richard fell in with bad characters down in Mexico: liars, thieves, charlatans, conmen of the blackest hearts imaginable.
He had always moved among and amidst these men, working in the oilfields of West Texas, but had been able before to keep them at arm’s length, focusing instead upon his labors.
In Mexico, however, isolate amidst a foreign culture and foreign tongue, the oilmen were forced to band together in a small clan on the outskirts of the village in which they were making their latest big play (relentless self-dramatizers, they referred to it as their Last Great Play, at the base of the Sierra Occidentals—though what Richard believed, even as a young man, was that the world was huge, and that there would always be one more great play, and then another, and then another).
Besieged as they were by loneliness, the independent oilmen—a disparate and mongrel mix of Texan financial backers and renegade politicians with part-time connections to the Mexican and United States governments, Cajun roughnecks and north Mississippi and south Alabama roustabouts and South Texas water-well drillers, self-taught engineers who could drill a well with a broomstick and a rubber band—men who could not, would not, be diverted from their goal, regardless of what that goal was—gathered in the evening to drink and talk.
United not just by their goal—cheap shallow oil and gas in a nation not yet bound and hamstrung by environmental restrictions—the den of rapscallions became not unlike a small community, gossiping and begrudging and yet remaining intensely loyal to one another.
They played cards in the evening and went into Rio Hondo, drinking and whoring and commandeering entire restaurants. They flew their little planes through the night sky and across and around the mountains while drunk, flying wherever and whenever they wanted, as if the little buzzing aircraft were nothing more than toy rides at an amusement park.
They flew with powerful spotlights and shone them down onto the desert floor, and into the oak and piñon forests of the mountains, where the beams, bright as comets, sought the reflecting red eyes of foxes and coyotes, deer and little wolves, jackrabbits and javelinas, which the oilmen pursued for sport. Sometimes they poked rifles and shotguns out through the popped-open vented windows, angling to get a shot.
Owls flew beneath them, ghostly in the glare of the spotlights, and the worst of the reprobates fired at the gliding birds below, as if the owls were not hunters like themselves but acted as some kind of shield, providing a net or layer of intervening grace separating the denizens of the desert floor.
They staged mock dogfights too, games of chicken in which their little planes would buzz one another, flying straight-on toward each other before flaring away at the last second—always, the rule was for each fighter to peel to the right. Sometimes, after they had fired into a herd of mule deer, securing what they called camp meat, they would land their planes on the des
ert, landing whenever and wherever they wanted—a gravel road, or even the floor of the desert itself—and with the rich scent of freshly chopped prickly pear sweet in the air from where the propeller had whacked out a swath upon landing, and the gin scent of crushed juniper beneath the plane’s wheels, the oilmen spilled out onto the chalky, dusty desert and ran whooping after their wounded prey, baying like bloodhounds, following the injured animal sometimes by sight though other times by the crimson trail of blood.
They tripped and stumbled in gopher holes and ran over the backs of buzzing rattlesnakes; and often, the wounded bucks got away, leaving the oilmen to come straggling, lost and breath-heaving, back toward the plane. Often they could not find the plane again in the darkness and were forced to spend the night in the desert, bivouacked beneath a scraggly mesquite tree, no longer omnipotent, but as meek and lost as coyote pups, until the harsh flat light of desert morning revealed to them the next day the distant glint of their carriage, and they could stagger back to it, holding their heads with both hands to minimize the jar of each hung-over step.
Other times they found their quarry, sometimes stone dead though occasionally still living, in which case the rougher of the oilmen could be counted on to leap upon the dying animal with pocketknives or stones, putting the animal out of its misery, as they referred to it, before gutting the animal and then dragging it in a wandering backtrack that roughly approximated the blood-painted markings of the flight; and being the youngest, it was usually Richard who was called upon to sledge the carcass back toward the plane.
The brow tines of the deer’s antlers would dig into his palm and wrist and forearm as he pulled it across the sand, and although he found the ritual unpleasant, he chose not to perceive that his own life had any other route; or rather, that this path to his other desires was the most feasible as well as the most mythic: and in his desire for the oil and gas just below, there was not much that he would not have done.
