by Rick Bass
And Sy Craven would wonder later that same day, or the next, about the nature of the woman who was no longer with Richard; wondered if he would survive her or not.
There were times when Richard went into the mountains not in dreamtime, but in real life, in the full daylight; times when, increasingly, he chose not to accompany the rest of the consortium into any of the border towns or parlors in which they sought their entertainment, but instead traveled farther up into the hills, and then up into the black volcanic rocks, the reefs and castles and turrets of the mountains themselves, where giant golden eagles nested, and bighorn sheep climbed like magicians up and over improbable spires.
He found springs in the mountains, in which clear water trickled two and three feet deep, little pools with black sand beaches stippled with the fresh tracks of the comings and goings of every denizen of the mountains, and with—and this seemed to him to be the wildest miracle—little fish, top-water Gambusia minnows, flitting back and forth through vertical beams of underwater sunlight, their eyes as bright as coins, each no larger than the head of a pin.
Had they been swept up in waterspouts or the violent dust devils that sometimes caterwauled across the lowlands, spinning and whirling before being deposited here and only here, guided and directed to this pool by nothing less than the hand of God? Had passing birds likewise brought them to this one spot, in desiccated eggs or packed tight in the birds’ gullets, regurgitating them accidentally and yet by fate into these saving waters?
Richard had no idea. He could reconstruct a deadened earth below, and every one of its mysteries both vast and minute; but of the processes of life above, such as how a minnow made it up into a mountaintop vernal pool, he was uncertain. He would lie there for hours, on his belly in the cool sand, watching the minnows: sometimes trying to figure it out, and other times just watching them.
The birds’ songs would surround him. They darted out over the hidden watering hole to snap and peck midair at translucent shimmering-wing insects rising from the water’s surface, and then returned to their perches in the willows to consume the insects, nipping them into pieces in three neat bites, head, thorax, and abdomen, while avoiding the delicate wings, which, when disembodied, fell fluttering to the sand like the scales of dragons, and gathered in small glittering wind-drift piles.
No one knew of the vernal ponds. There were pictographs on some of the blackened basalt faces from travelers hundreds or perhaps thousands of years ago; rock etchings on the brooding boulders, stick figures of men with spears, men hunting, dragging the carcasses of deer and antelope and bighorn sheep behind them, as he and his compatriots had done: though in none of the pictographs was there the image of a man lying on his belly in the black sand, staring into the clear waters.
And for some reason this made Richard feel better, made him feel that he was on some grand adventure, and was to some degree different from all the thousands of generations of the race of men who had lived before him.
No one had traveled this path ever before: not the path he had taken, nor—and this was what began to remind him to feel joy, and to know courage again—the path that remained before him.
There were no other sounds but the tanagers and warblers, and the desert-dry summer clack of grasshoppers, the occasional buzzing wing-clatter of dragonflies—outlandish primitive dinosaurs whose fossils, like the horsetails, he had found in his diggings.
No other sounds. No drone of planes from the geologists engaged in their mock dogfights, no lisp and hiss and suction-gasp rattle of faraway pumpjacks: only mountain silence.
What if, he wondered during one such outing, his entire life, and all that he had already known and lost, had been, instead of the peak of excess, nowhere near enough?
What if all that—Clarissa’s beauty, and the freedom and exploration in the country beyond Odessa—had been as but a paucity, compared to all that was yet to come?
He listened more intently to the silence beneath the birdsong and blaze of sun, and beneath the whorl of dragonflies. It seemed there was another sound, one that had been present all along, but which he had not noticed, and which only now in his mind was he able to separate and unravel from the thread of farther silence.
It was a murmuring, trickling sound, fainter than a whisper. The water at the far end of the pond was stirring slightly, as if the breath of a breeze had found it, or as if some small creature labored just beneath the surface, preparing to rise.
Some of the water was dabbed up by the birds, and some of it, without question, had been drunk by humans, century after century; and that which was not utilized by ferns or flowers or wolves sank then unclaimed back down into the sand and the basalt fissures below, draining away surely into nothingness, and never-knowingness—a quick glimpse of the sunlit world above, and then back down into eternal darkness—and yet the pictographs bore witness that no matter how low the pond got, the spring always filled it back up, patient and ceaseless; and that over the years, the world had adjusted to accommodate the taking with the giving.
It was this balance, the equipoise, that he felt so deeply, lying there at water’s edge, staring at the minnows. He could feel, finally, his own well recharging; and being at heart and by practice as much of a taker as a giver, he began only now, finally, to believe that it was his time to take again: that all of the millions of barrels of oil, and billions of cubic feet of gas he had found and taken in the last few recent years, had been as but a sport and a pastime, compared to what he had had, briefly, before, and had lost.
With even those blessings—Clarissa, and the strength of his innocence—having been, he saw now, not enough.
There was a creek, a small river, the Rio Madeira, that wandered along the country between the foothills and the desert, some twenty miles south of the consortium’s main play. They had sunk a few test wells down in that region, trying to define the farthest reaches of the field in that direction, and had pretty much satisfied themselves that that was the outer reaches of their play—that the Rio Madeira was the remnant of an old fault that climbed from deep beneath the mountains, the same fault that had birthed the mountains and estranged them from the desert—and that on the other side of that river, no oil or gas could be found.
Nonetheless, because it was the nearest known surface water of any significance (Richard had told no one of his discovery in the mountains), this was where the geologists went to recreate, now and again—to ride in the ripply current in inner tubes, leather-skinned paunchy old men gripping cold bottles of beer and smoking cigars, wearing sunglasses but hatless, broiling to the color of lobsters beneath the sun, drifting and bumping along beneath sycamores and cottonwoods, riding the Madeira past bleached-white beaches as if content to follow the lost river all the way into some nether world.
And it was a lost river. In times of drought it would disappear beneath the surface for hundreds of yards at a time, so that, cursing and grieving, the oilmen would have to stagger to their feet and tuck their inner tubes under one hand and grip their ice chests in another, and stumble on bruised and tender feet across the bare stones, limping and gimping bowlegged that farther distance like penitents, if they desired the pleasure of riding again with the river, which reemerged always some distance ahead.
Campesinos from as far away as sixty miles would show up at the river likewise, to swim and picnic, with the ambiguities of the river, the challenging path across the hot bare stones, the cold beer, and, above all, always, the broiling desert sun providing a great democracy of equality—and on those occasional off-days when the oilmen traveled down to the Madeira to cool off in the water and to leer at the wives and sisters and daughters of paisanos, it was possible for almost all of them, both castes, to forget that just to the north the oilmen were presiding over the creation of a wealth that would eventually prove to be so vast as to subsume perhaps even the biblical descriptions of heaven, with streets of gold and gates of marble and pearl.
Some of the campesinos worked as drill hands at t
he compound, while others labored in the kitchen, or as janitorial staff, at subminimum wages that were still greater by a factor of ten than anything else they could be earning. (The drug trades had not begun flourishing, but instead lay nascent, like a river gone back underground for a stretch of time.)
Millionaires and paupers alike sat in the shade beneath the sycamores, the white and tan bark flaking in great puzzle-piece peels, and the pale-skinned oilmen brilliant ivory, and few in number, compared to the dozens of native river-goers, their own skin dark and coppery.
In the early autumn of Richard’s eighth year in the Sierra Occidentals, during the period of lowest water, on a Sunday, while driving down to the Rio Madeira one day—the geologists in a long caravan of open-topped jeeps, drinking beer already at ten o’clock on a Sunday morning, and bouncing along dusty cowtrails and crossing back and forth across the cobbly river, splashing over the shallow fords and crossings in which the water barely even came up to the axles—George Waller, who was driving one of the jeeps, looked downstream into one of the deeper holes and happened to see an immense black shape suspended in the clear waters, finning slowly.
He stopped the jeep midriver, disbelieving—it was easily the biggest catfish any of them had ever seen—and what was more amazing to them was that it was trapped in the deep pothole; that due to its great size—as large as a hog—it had run out of water sufficient to sustain its mass.
It must have slithered and bumped its way down from some series of upper, deeper pools, they speculated, until finally it had run out of water just below the crossing, and had taken refuge in the pool into which they were now staring, the deep hole that was not much larger than a tub, but with no way out until the river rose again, which would not happen until the rains of winter.
“That motherfucker is ours,” George Waller said, getting out of the jeep and splashing out to the pool where the fish lay trapped. The other oilmen followed.
They gathered around the stony basin, the warm shallow water flowing past them in a sheet. Little minnows darted past, collided against their ankles, and the catfish’s only response was to sink deeper, lowering himself another three feet, to the bottom of his tomb, though there was no movement of fins or muscle that the oilmen could discern: he appeared simply to decide to sink.
“He’s sulking,” George Waller said. “My God, what a fish.” They stood there admiring him, and before a full second had passed, George Waller announced, “Let’s eat him.”
The other oilmen knew what he was talking about. It was their custom every several months to hold a cookout, partly as a way of treating the local workers and their families to a feast to engender continued goodwill toward their employers, though also out of some deeper need for hunter-gatherer or even agricultural ritual, for they usually planned the barbecues to coincide with the logging of an important well.
A cow would be slaughtered and butchered and cooked in its entirety, or three or four hogs, or a dozen goats, while the oilmen tried to visit among the locals, who stood in the heat next to the blazing coals with plates heaped high and who smiled nervously at the cluster of oilmen who approached them, attempting their pidgin Spanish.
The oilmen were jumpy, too, on such occasions—nervous about the well’s chances for success—and this act, this offering, was as close to prayer as any of them got.
This fish, despite its immensity, wasn’t large enough to serve all the part-time workers and their friends and family, but George Waller wanted to take it downstream to show the families congregated on the beach nonetheless; wanted to capture it and display it as a symbol and marker of his prowess in the world—though there was still some salvageable part of him, some dim place of instinct, that rebelled against the notion of killing such a magnificent animal, and that desired to keep it alive for as long as possible.
The men continued to stare down at the fish as if into a well. The engineers began to consider the logistics. George Waller was of the opinion that someone “young and strong” should lower himself into the pool, gaff the giant fish through the mouth—there was barely room in the pool for the fish to turn around—and then fasten a rope to the gaff and walk the fish downstream, leading it through the shallows, as if walking a dog.
Richard laughed; he was willing—he envisioned himself riding the fish briefly as he wrestled it, its back nearly as broad as a pony’s—but in the end, the capture was far simpler than any of them could have imagined, for the fish was famished, having been trapped for weeks, and when they lowered a crude hook made of twisted wire into the well, baited with nothing more than one of the rolled-up tortillas the cooks had made that morning, the catfish swallowed it immediately, then whirled as the point of the hook bit through its lip and sunk deep into the cartilage of its mouth.
For fishing line, the geologists were using the cotton string with which they marked and surveyed new well locations, and as the fish cleared its pool and began trying to slither and muscle its way downriver, wriggling through three or four inches of water like some changeling unleashed upon the world, some of the men turned and ran, and slipped and fell down hard in the shallows.
George Waller commanded Richard to “Get him!”—shouting in an urgent falsetto that the men would later mimic, and for which George Waller would not forgive Richard. And without quite knowing why he did so, Richard splashed along behind the fish, which, despite its mass, was making slow progress, its strength robbed by the absence of water; and Richard was able to subdue it easily by wrapping his arms around its broad back, as if he were bulldogging a steer in a rodeo.
The other men gathered themselves, bruised and dripping and embarrassed now, and came sloshing over to examine the stilled and panting fish. Red Watkins, who had not entered the fray, but who had been standing on shore watching and laughing, called out to them to be sure to keep its skin wet—the fish didn’t have to be kept in water, only his gills needed to stay wet, and as long as they kept water splashed on him, he would stay alive—and so now, like children, the oilmen crouched beside their strange prize again and began to splash him, tentatively at first, but then with purpose, splashing Richard and the fish together, and they began to laugh, not mockingly nor as victors or conquerors, but only because they were happy.
They led the catfish back upstream, three and four of them hauling on it at a time. The engineers piled up towels to plug the seam along the tailgate and filled the back of the jeep with water, scooping it from the river with an empty ice chest. They lifted the catfish into the back of the jeep—despite the fish’s weeklong fast, its white belly sagged and hung heavy, as if it had been swallowing basketballs—and they finished fording the crossing and drove on south along the river road, passing beneath the dappled shade of the riverside trees, the broad green leaves of summer casting rippling shadows upon the men and their jeeps, so that seen from above, it might have seemed that they, too, were just beneath the surface, and swimming.
The villagers who were down at the river that day gathered in great numbers around the fish, disbelieving as it banged around in the back of the jeep, unruly as a calf. The villagers reached in and touched its wetted back, thrilled by the power of the shudder that ran through the fish and into them as they did so, and they regarded the oilmen anew, as if having misjudged them, for most of what they did was below ground, as little seen or understood as work performed by smoke and mirrors; but this fish, real and tangible, seemed to offer some evidence of worth or talent on their part, and appeared to give refutation to a previously held opinion of the oilmen that had been less than favorable.
The landscape would be altered and then broken here, as it was everywhere they passed, made eventually unfamiliar even to the old men and women who had been born there—each new well, and each new road crisscrossing the desert and the mountains, burying their homelands with incremental abuse, and with their rarest and most vital of fluids, the groundwater, being slowly poisoned by the contamination and intrusion of all the drilling fluids—and yet, fifty years la
ter, when the villagers were asked about the oilmen, and of what those times had been like, it would not be the pristine, immemorial desert landscape that had existed before the geologists had arrived that they spoke of, but instead, almost exclusively, the big fish.
They had seen the fish only briefly, that one day, strange as an alien, and stranger still for having been neither summoned nor suspected. It would become the watchword for how they thought of, and discussed, the oilmen ever after—not as the ones who had built a glittering civilization of pipelines and wellheads in the desert. Instead, they would remember them as the men who had produced from the desert a far more miraculous thing, the giant fish, glimpsed briefly but more real than any vaporous gas or rumor of wealth below: a creature twice as large as any of them would have guessed could exist, black as the desert sky at night, with long whiskers and sharp little teeth. A devourer of ducks and rabbits and perhaps even fawns; a behemoth and leviathan, and a creature wholly and totally dependent upon water, great amounts of water.
Rather than inviting the villagers, laborers, and their families, George Waller decided to throw a party for the fish, and he hired a boy to keep the fish alive for the three days before the event. Prostitutes would be flown in from Mexico City, a band from Vera Cruz, and caviar from Russia, via Houston. (None of the oilmen cared for the taste of caviar, but they ate it at such soirees nonetheless, suffering it as one of the necessary prices for asserting the privilege of flaunting their wealth. There was not a man among them who came from old money; they had each scrapped and fought their way into affluence, and in this, too, they were united.)
There was no clean water pit or tank in which to place the fish. The geologists did not want him living in the back of any of the jeeps, which were needed for field duty, and so for three days the boy, Tomás—fourteen years old, but small for his size and appearing younger—squatted beside the gasping fish, which was laid out on a wetted burlap bag in a small sandy pit, in the shade between the bunkhouse and a toolshed where he kept the fish hosed down with a steady trickle of cool ancient water that had been mined from a well that reached a thousand feet into the past.
