by Rick Bass
The fish flapped and struggled and twisted, swinging wildly on the rope and croaking, but there was no relief to be found. The croaking was loud and bothersome and so the men lowered the fish, carried it over to the picnic table beside the fire, and began sawing the head off. When they had that done, the two pieces—head and torso—were still moving, though with less vigor—the fish’s body writhing very slowly on the table, and the mouth of the fish’s head opening and closing just as slowly, and still the fish kept croaking, though more quietly now, as if perhaps it had gotten something it had been asking for and was now somewhat appeased.
The teeth of the saw were flecked with bone and fish-muscle, gummed with cartilage and gray brain. “Here,” said Waller, handing Tomás the saw, “go down to the mud pit and wash that off.” He looked at the gasping head (the rope was still passed through the mouth and gills) and said, “Take this down there, too, and feed it to the turtles—make it stop making that noise”—and some of the men and women laughed.
He handed Tomás the rope with the heavy croaking head attached to it, and Tomás took it and turned and went down into the darkness toward the shining round mud pit—the full moon was reflected in it like an eye—and as he walked, there was silence down by the mud pit, except for the dull croaking coming from the package he carried at the end of the rope: carrying it almost like a basket or a purse. He could hear the sounds of the party up on the hill, but down by the mud pit, with the moon’s gold eye cold upon it, there was silence, save for the deep-purring fish head.
Tomás lowered the fish head into the warm water and watched as it sank down below the moon. It was still croaking, and the gasping made a stream of bubbles that trailed up to the surface as it sank, and for a little while, even after it was gone, it seemed he could still hear the raspy croaking—duller, now, and much fainter—coming from beneath the water; and like a child, he held the brief thought or hope that maybe the fish was relieved now; that maybe the water felt good on its gills and on what was left of its body.
He set about washing the saw. Bits of flesh floated off the blade and across the top of the water. After he had the blade cleaned, he sat and listened for the croaking, but could hear nothing, and was relieved. (In later years, Tomás would have the occasional dreams that the great fish had survived; that it had regenerated a new body to match the giant head, and that it still lurked in that pond, savage, betrayed, wounded.)
He sat there quietly and soon enough the crickets became accustomed to his presence and began chirping again, and a peace filled back in over the scuzzy pond, and over the night, like a scar healing, or like grass growing bright and green across a charred landscape. Out in the desert, chuck-will’s-widows began calling once more, and Tomás sat there and listened to the sounds of the party up on the hill. Someone had brought fiddles and they were beginning to play, and it was a sweet sound, in no way in accordance with the earlier events of the evening.
Tomás could smell the odor of meat cooking and knew the giant fish had been laid to rest atop the coals.
The light from the lanterns on the hill was making a gold dome of light in the darkness—to Tomás it looked like an umbrella—and after a while he turned and went back up to the light and to the noise of the party.
In gutting and cleaning the fish before skewering it on an iron rod to roast, the cooks had cut open its stomach to see what it had been eating. They found a small gold pocket watch, fairly well preserved, though with the engraving worn away so that all they could see on the inside face was the year, 1898. It was decided that in honor of his having the barbecue, George Waller should receive the treasure from the fish’s stomach. (There was also a can opener, a couple of handfuls of pesos and centavos, a slimy tennis shoe, some bailing wire, and a large soft-shelled turtle, still alive, which clambered out of its leathery entrapment and with webbed feet, long claws, and frantically outstretched neck scuttled its way blindly down toward the mud pit—knowing instinctively where water and safety lay, and where, Tomás supposed, it later found the catfish’s bulky head and began feasting on it.)
In subsequent days Red Watkins would take the watch apart—George Waller wanted nothing to do with it—and clean it piece by piece and then spend the better part of a month, in the hot middle part of the day, as he babysat all the various rigs and their crews, reassembling the watch, after drying the individual pieces in that bright September light.
That night at the party, one woman stood out from the rest. She was dressed like a flapper, and she went up to where the fish skin was hanging from a nail on a mesquite tree, still wet and shiny. She turned her back to the bonfire that was burning, lowered her dress to her waist, and slipped into the fish skin, wrapping it tightly around her like a vest, then turned to face the crowd, and started to dance in front of the fire, and in front of the partygoers.
The fiddles slowly stopped playing, one by one, so that the only sound was the crackling of the fire, and Tomás could see the woman doing her fish dance, with her arms clasped together over her head, and dust plumes rising from her shuffling feet, and then people were edging in front of him, a wall of people, so that he could not see.
More plumes of dust came hurrying down the road, cars traveling toward the party as if knowing that the fish lady was dancing, and hurrying to see her; while beyond, in the desert landscape stretching to the blue mountains and then up into the mountains, they could see the flares of the gas wells venting fifty- and sixty-foot plumes of flame into the night sky. The natural gas was rarely worth selling, was cheaper to waste than to utilize, its removal necessary to get to the sweet dark oil below.
A hundred, then two hundred, then three hundred such flares were visible, delineating the developing ghost-shape of the giant oilfield below, the columns of flame appearing perhaps like the burning bars of a cage to the partygoers, or, to those passing over in a plane, the shape or outline of a great dragon or sea monster below, or even an immense fish.
Tomás left the encampment after a solitary breakfast the next morning, the cooks and he the only ones awake at the bright hour of nine o’clock. Richard, who had not participated in the evening’s revelry, had already gone back out into the field, and Tomás, with the prize of the fish-killing pistol hidden in his ancient canvas rucksack, was paid an extra twenty dollars for washing the cars and planes.
He had worked through the night, catnapping amidst the sounds of the party—he had awakened at dawn to the sight of the tarantulas creeping past and around the scattered bodies of several of the partygoers, who lay felled like soldiers defending a homeland or a cherished cause, rather than simple victims of folly and ill-considered choice—and as he was leaving, Sy Craven came out and thanked him, asked for his full name so that he might contact him at some point in the future about other work, and then Tomás left, declining Sy Craven’s offer to have one of the pilots fly him back to his hometown, twenty miles distant.
Instead he set off on foot. By noon, he was back to the upper reaches of the Madeira, where he lay down in the tall autumn-dry grass beside the river in the cool shade of a sycamore and napped for two hours, listening to the sound of the river running like blood, and the yellow grass rustling.
He slept peacefully right until the end of his nap, when he dreamed that he had lost all the money he had earned—that he had gone swimming in the river and it had floated out, gotten wet and deteriorated, simply vanished—and he sat up in terror, felt frantically for the money and, even after discovering it was still with him, had trouble calming his heart.
He rose and followed the river downstream, eventually passing by the ford where George Waller had spied and caught the great fish. He observed the tire tracks where the brigade of jeeps had crossed the shallow water, bruising the white limestone and its thin sheet of algae, and paused to watch a swarming school of tiny catfish, black as ink, the underwater cloud of them drifting in writhing nucleus downstream, the entire school of them ravenous, just hatched. Some would be eaten by crows and belted kingfis
hers, others by shrikes and frogs and turtles and raccoons. Others of them would be charmed, and might go on to live for several years. One in ten thousand of them, or one in a hundred thousand, might go on to become giants; or perhaps none at all, perhaps never again.
He patted the money in his pocket, shifted the heft of his rucksack to reassure himself that that prize was there, too, and marveled at all that could happen in the world in only a few days. Still, he had decided that he did not care to work for Sy Craven, or any of the others—not anywhere, not ever again—though the wealth he had gotten from the last three days’ work would last him and his family for weeks.
The lullaby of the river and the sound of the leaves rattling in the breeze above conspired to help him forget, for a while, his betrayal of the fish, and by the time he arrived back at his village that evening, where his family was astounded by the sudden wealth, he felt properly hardened, sufficiently encased and rigid against the possibility of that memory ever returning with its full emotional debts and obligations. A man, already.
It wasn’t so much that Richard kept dreaming of Clarissa—only occasionally, once a year or so, would she return to him in his sleeping dreams—but, more problematic, thoughts of her invaded his waking moments, quiet moments that should have been filled with peace and forward-looking.
He wanted in no way to become one of those wrecks of human beings who is haunted by the past, imprisoned by regrets and the plague of What if?
Yet as the years went past, he felt himself getting no better. The pain was gone, but not the ache.
Is she more beautiful still? he could not help but wonder, and, Perhaps she is calmer, perhaps she is less frightened. The thoughts and memories and desires returned to him on their own, as if they had achieved some enspiriting and now moved in the world with their own clockwork logic, arising and sleeping and then arising again, searching him out and intersecting with him for a while, then departing, yet returning: not just at dawn and dusk, but at any odd time of the day. And he began, finally, to understand that he was going to have to try to set the weight of her aside or be crushed, that he could go no further without attempting that: but that he would not let go of the old weight of her without attempting to find some new weight to carry.
I want one more chance, Richard told himself. The Sierra Occidentals meant nothing to him, were insufficient as a substitute for passion—they had never meant anything to him—and so it seemed to him therefore that there was no choice but to backtrack to the last place on the path where anything had mattered to him, and to begin anew.
Here, too, in Mexico, the earth began to cave beneath the oilmen’s weight, and their consumption. By Richard’s eighth year, enough oil and gas had been pulled out from below, and enough water had been mined to use for the manufacture of all the various drilling fluids, that, as in Odessa, the desert floor began to sag and buckle in places.
Pipelines ruptured and sprayed fountains of flame a hundred feet into the air, and pooled blackish-green oil across the desert, creating little lakes and ponds of oil. Red Watkins was kept busier than he’d ever been, racing from one location to another, shutting off pipelines and ordering backhoes to dig up and refit the broken lines. Bulldozers shoved the oil-sodden earth into huge piles, blackened cone-shaped mountains appearing incongruously out in the center of the desert, with the tangled pipes still protruding from those piles, and then the workers ignited them, where the burning oil-sand would go on to smolder for years, clouding the desert sky with ribbons and tendrils of black smoke, and the odor of burning tires.
It was abysmal, none of the geologists were happy about it, but it was the cost of doing business, they said; the price of the world’s growing appetite for their product. “The blood of the past,” Sy Craven called it.
It seemed to Richard that he began to lose his nerve. He dreamed some nights that the ground he was walking upon was collapsing, insufficient to hold even his own insignificant weight. In the dreams, he usually fell in only up to his waist or his armpits, and was able to crawl out, though there were also dreams in which he fell endlessly, fell all the way into wakefulness, landing with a shout and finding himself sitting up in bed in the bunkhouse with his heart sore and raw from having pounded so hard.
It would take him several minutes to calm and convince himself, in the darkness, that he had indeed not fallen off the face of the earth—had not been swallowed and consumed by the thing he had spent the last many years pursuing—and he would sit there for a while longer, sweating and remembering the dream in its clarity, while surrounded by the snores of the other men.
Is this what it felt like to the great fish? he wondered. Was there a moment of sudden illumination when it first found itself trapped in the last deep hole?
Was there immediate chagrin, or did the regret and despair seep into the fish day by day and hour by hour, as it waited for the executioner, George Waller, to appear?
There was a fracas, later that autumn, when Richard went to Sy Craven and informed him that he had decided to retire from the company; that he understood he would waive full benefits, that he was only fifteen months shy of being fully vested, and that rather than walking away with millions, he would be leaving with far less than that amount. His annual salary had been generous and adequate, and his expenses almost nil. He would have to work again someday, particularly back on the other side of the border, but not for a while; in his last eight years, he felt as if he had already worked a lifetime. He could devote himself to other pursuits. He could reconsider other, past desires. He felt that he was finally rested enough to do so—to reenter the past—and believed fully that he would do so, if only because that was what he had always done, all his life.
Is it always this way? he wondered, staring out at the blackened and ruined landscape. Does even a single scratch upon the surface reveal, almost always, the identical results, over and over again? Despite the lessons of his profession, he did not want to believe this was true, and yet, too often, the evidence before him seemed incontrovertible.
Sy Craven cursed him, then pleaded with him, telling him he had built entire drilling programs around him. He offered him outlandish incentives, then cursed him again when he refused. The eight years, nearly nine, had been necessary, but had been too long already, there could be no comparison between them and the four months he had had with Clarissa. He dared not try to explain these things to the other geologists and engineers, but simply shook his head and said that his heart was no longer in it: and they, with their alcohol-shrunken livers and emphysemic lung-hackings, their goiters and syphilis and gout, only stared at him uncomprehendingly. George Waller was not-so-secretly thrilled, and winced when Sy Craven suggested that Richard consider it merely a leave of absence, that he take some time off to do whatever he felt he needed to do, and then come back tan and rested and ready.
Only Red Watkins among them seemed to understand. With his rheumy eyes and rickety teeth, his shallow, labored breathing and otherwise-fading body, he regarded Richard with a mixture of surprise and respect that encouraged Richard to keep to his decision and to tell Sy Craven that no, it would not be a leave of absence, that it would be the real thing.
Richard thought that Craven was going to strike him then, but instead he simply cursed again and then turned his back on him and left, walking out of the room before Richard could—and disbelieving at the folly he had witnessed, George Waller followed quickly, shaking his head in delighted confirmation at this final revelation of the younger man’s instability: and Richard smiled and waved goodbye to him, knowing that George Waller could easily spend the next ten years berating him to Sy Craven, and redefining his success into failure, even as the desert around them continued to collapse beneath the weight of all indications to the contrary.
It was the worst and most shocking thing any of them could imagine—many of them wondered afterward if Richard had been ill, or if there had been a death or illness in his family, or if—as George Waller continued to suggest—he
was suffering some sort of breakdown, some collapse of nerve. Among them all, only Red Watkins remained nonjudgmental, and his firm, gnarly handshake seemed to Richard to be more than approving.
Richard didn’t think the car he’d arrived in almost a decade earlier would survive the journey back, and Sy Craven wouldn’t let him buy one of the company jeeps, so Red Watkins had to drive him north to the border crossing where Richard could then catch a bus to Texas.
The two men drove through the darkness—Craven had refused to let Red Watkins take off any time from work, so that he’d had to leave at night, like a truant schoolboy rather than an aging man, in order to be back by daylight.
As they drove, Red Watkins told Richard about the brief period of time before he’d begun work in the oilfields, his first twenty years. He had learned a lot and seen a lot and had no regrets, he said—in many ways, he believed that he had been made for the oilfield, that no profession could have suited him better—but that he did wonder sometimes, especially now that he was dying, about the path he had not chosen, the other path, and where it might have led.
It made him feel lonely, he said, as if there was some other part of himself out there that he had never known, or had known ever so briefly, but then abandoned, and which judged him, somehow, for that abandonment.
“You could come on across with me,” Richard said, and Red Watkins shook his head and said that Richard didn’t understand, that that path and that life had died long ago, and that there was no way to reclaim it now even if he’d wanted to. The gravel road turned briefly to pavement, and glittered in the headlights with flecks of dark silica. A hundred yards of pavement, as if from this point forward, the way for all travelers would be easier, faster.
