by Rick Bass
The artist-in-residence, a young woman from Philadelphia named Beth, was athletic and tireless; she had worked with the students ceaselessly during their five weeks, had things hidden in store for the town that might not have appeared before them in their wildest dreams, puppets that not even the children had seen before the great parade.
Working in her off-hours, and living in a windowless shack out east of even the windblown outskirts of Mormon Springs, she had labored each afternoon after school, and into the night and early hours of the morning, with her battery-powered tape-player booming out Steppenwolf, Billie Holiday, and, seemingly paradoxically, Marty Robbins, Johnny Cash (she liked to sing along at the top of her lungs to “Ring of Fire”), and Mozart—weeping, sometimes, at the nighttime beauty of the Requiem, as well as at the beauty, she had to admit it, of her own creations, which she understood were summoned only in part by the greatness of spirit that resided in any artist’s heart, with the rest of the creation appearing unaccounted for.
Beth had constructed dozens of puppets without the children’s help, puppets that would not be a part of the children’s self-scripted pageant, but would instead exist only for the children’s enjoyment, and as an exercise in her own ceaselessness: her hands’ inability to stop creating, once the flow had begun, once the vent shaft that was the source of her inspiration had opened; she found herself standing over it and peering down into a maelstrom of color and emotion and old unreplicated wisdoms, a roiling carnival of all the world yet to come, hidden and waiting only for her to release it.
In the creative haze of those hot afternoons and the slightly cooler nights, the puppeteer had constructed a giant Santa Claus, coyotes, space aliens, UFO rocketships, an elephant with sweeping tusks (knowing nothing of the history of Marie and Tsavo, but instead, merely staring down into the swirl of the muse), giant sailfish, dogs and cats, a King Kong character, and a thirty-foot-long rattlesnake with clattering coffee cans for a buzz-tail.
There was no electricity out at the broken-hinged Art Shack, as Beth called it, and so she worked by lantern light, and did not have to worry about spilling paint on the wide-cracked floorboards.
Moths circled her creations as she labored to bring them to a glossy sheen, and the insects often became entangled in the new paint, giving some of the puppets a furry, fuzzy look, which, rather than despairing over, she decided she liked, so that she even took strands of rope and binder’s twine and unraveled the braids to create a similar fuzz, which she glued onto the lion, the lamb, and, in an impulse that she knew was sinful and would be a direct affront to her host community, the cherubs and angels, and even to the woolly Baby Jesus in a cradle.
Lightning bugs likewise sometimes found themselves adhered to the paint, continuing to blink as the paint dried in the evening breezes, with a result that pleased Beth so much that she incorporated that design into the rhino, swaddling him with a string of Christmas-tree lights, and attaching to his tail a hundred-foot-long cheap extension cord. She papier-mâché-mounted votive candles in the eyes and along the backs of other creatures—roadrunners, gamecocks, vultures, jackrabbits—and left her creations behind the shack to dry in each day’s sun before covering them back up with blue plastic tarps.
On the night before the parade and with Ruth’s help, she loaded Ruth’s old truck with the secret puppets, making trips back and forth from Mormon Springs to town. She and Ruth used a long extension ladder to climb onto the rooftops of nearly all the two- and three-story buildings on Main Street, in addition to the seven-story oil and gas building, where they had positioned the puppets in hiding—“Ready for ambush,” Beth said—and then laid out the ziplines that were part of her stock-in-trade.
Made of urethane-coated airplane cable, the ziplines could be anchored to the ground at a distant point, with their puppets looped to the cable far above, from which point the puppets could then be launched into Peter Pan–like flight manually, or even released electronically via the command of a series of transmitters that Beth carried in the pocket of a fly-fishing vest she had designed for such events.
The two women worked through the night, that last night, obscuring the puppets behind blank sheets of newsprint through which the weighted forms could then crash, like football players running through paper stretched between goalposts at the start of a game: and to camouflage the paper from the notice of the regular workaday routines of the townspeople, Ruth and Beth painted the obscuring paper in the same tones and designs as the respective buildings that housed and held the puppets-in-waiting.
They engaged two of the students’ mothers to crouch hidden on the rooftops on either side of the street, stationing themselves to light the votive candles and plug in the extension cords at the appropriate time, the mothers running from rooftop to rooftop like train robbers, and thrilled to be participating in such daring.
Beth would leave soon after the performance, but the awe and force of what the mothers up on the rooftops had done, as well as the empowerment that resided in the children afterward—not just through the creation of their art, but through their presentation of it to the community, unbidden, and with the community—bankers, lawyers, bakers, geologists—coming out onto the street one by one and store by store to stare, in puzzled thrall of the children and their power—would burn in their hearts to some degree always, burning like the candles that were set into the pie-plates-for-eyes of the wing-stretched giant birds that the children’s mothers were lighting now and then sending swooping down onto the tower near the parade’s finale—a spectacle which even the proud children had not anticipated.
The wings of raven and red-tailed hawk, and of a golden eagle carrying a lamb in its talons, tipped and wobbled as they gained speed, nearing the bottom of the ziplines, and when they bumped or crashed to the ground, an occasional wing was torn loose, and the candles and candlewax spilled, igniting the paper, so that some of the creations, still tethered to the cable, burned brightly, sending up the burning black and green smoke of their paint.
The children in the parade moved carefully past the hulks of this flaming wreckage, as if through a battlefield in which the campaign had just ended, and marveled as, just ahead of them, the blinking rhinoceros wobbled and creaked as it hurtled overhead, passing from one side of the street to the other before bashing its head against the side of the bank building.
The rhino cracked open from the impact, and, hollow-shelled like a piñata, gold-wrapped candy coins spilled out, which the children fell upon with chocolaty zeal—and when the electrified elephant, seemingly as large as a blimp, came gliding down the final zipline, settling unharmed in the center of the street, even the scandalized townsfolk, who had not yet decided if they were being mocked or not, were overcome by the spectacle, and wandered out into the street among the strange creatures, amid the can-pounding and bean-shaking and marble-rattling, the xylophonic washboard-scraping, and examined the elephant admiringly.
Annie, who had been raised on the lore of Marie’s elephant, lifted the giant buffalo mask off her costume and was among the first to reach the elephant—she looked back at Marie triumphantly, and yet not overly surprised, as if believing that into each and every life there might always appear at least one elephant, completely unexpected, and completely beautiful.
And as if in a dream, Marie, who had been wearing a Kiowa headdress and shaking a gourd rattle, went over to join her adopted daughter, and all the other children and townsfolk, around the elephant—she was seventy-two, that autumn, and it stunned her to realize that some forty years had gone by since her own elephant had passed through—and she laughed at the incongruity of it, the elephant on Main Street, reappearing when she had least expected it. She thought she had known what Beth was up to—she thought, in fact, that she surely knew the world, could predict with near-numbing regularity its comings and goings—and the surprise of it was delicious, so much so that she, like the others, felt compelled to simply stand in the elephant’s company, and to examine its lacquered sides, the
glossy tusks, the stiff wide ears, and the thick legs: almost as pleased with its presence as if it had been the real thing.
The children, believing that this puppet, too, contained chocolate and other candy, quickly laid into the elephant, stripping it of its glow-lighting and leaping upon its back to smash it apart, and wrenching its tusks from their sockets and reaching their hands up inside it, searching.
Finding nothing, they began unpeeling the cardboard, working in a frenzy now—certain that great glories were housed within—and in a matter of only seconds, the elephant had all but vanished, leaving in its place only a flattened jumble of painted cardboard, some wadded-up newspaper, electrical wiring, and twin eyebolts hanging from the zipline: and the children were mortified by what they had done, though Beth was amused, laughing at the speed with which her handiwork had been disassembled, and she gestured to the children to step back, then motioned to Ruth to step forward and with her barbecue-grill flamethrower vaporize the remains, as if the animal had carried some awful disease and had had to be incinerated.
And when the children saw that the elephant’s creator was untroubled by the creature’s demise, and that their teacher was leading the cremation, they felt less guilty, and gathered back together in post-performance glow, their choreography completed, while the elephant puppet smoldered and crackled in flame.
Ancient Herbert Mix was in the parade, too, dressed in no costume of his or the puppeteer’s making, but instead a snow-white suit of spangled sequins and fringe, his one leg’s white cowboy boot, a white Stetson, with toy six-shooter cap pistols in a toy holster, perched sidesaddle on a tiny white Shetland pony. Mix quivered with joy as he rode alongside the dragon, and the buffalo, and the towering Comanche with his spear—and it was this day, and into this inexplicable but wonderful pageant, that Richard returned to his old town, the site of his old battle for the impenetrable heart of Clarissa.
He had gotten off at the bus station a mile west of town and, no longer knowing anyone, had walked into town, duffel bag slung over his shoulder: and when he came down Main Street from the other direction and beheld the townspeople on the sidewalks, and saw the one-legged, wizened Herbert Mix all dolled up, snapping off shots with his little pistols, and the dragon breathing fire, and then the flying elephant soaring down into the street, he was not sure what to think, other than that once again he felt he was somehow in the right place at the right time.
He had not known it the first time, but this time he was starting to understand and be aware of his fortunes, as well as the responsibilities of those fortunes, the eternal second chances that the earth itself seemed determined to keep delivering up to him. The replications of history.
It took a while to get things sorted out; it was an hour or two before the streets were cleaned and the excitement died down, and the businesses were able to return to their sleepy paces. The loft in which Marie and Annie had lived before moving out to Mormon Springs was available, and Richard was able to rent it from the church. From the upstairs balcony, he watched the Mormon Springs students loading the last of their costumes into the trucks, saw the diminutive puppeteer coiling up the ziplines—saw the two women climbing down from the roof of the bank, breaking down their extension ladders like workaday painters or plumbers and toting them back to the trucks, where all the carcasses of puppets, some charred and broken and others still intact, were piled high—and Richard marveled at how much the town had changed in the ten or so years since his departure.
He had no way of knowing he was witnessing an anomaly—that the puppeteer, Beth, was but a random seed cast by the wind, as were even the tiny handful of others whom he had not yet met. Nor would he have been able to guess as to their viability, their chances for enduring, and affecting change.
To him, from that window in the spartan white room, it looked as if all the change had already occurred, and as if the roots of those seeds had already, in his ten years’ absence, reached deep, and had found both water and nutrients: and as if the once-cautious, once-conservative town of Odessa had not cut down those plants, or those roots, but had embraced them.
He showered and shaved, hung his clothes neatly in the tiny closet space, sat down on the bed and opened the phone book, three years out of date. Her parents were gone, and she was gone. For a moment, he held on to the idea that she had gotten married and changed her name; but then he laughed at himself, at having held on to even a shred of hope that it might be that easy, that she might have changed her character, embracing that which she had once reviled—and he admonished himself for having even dared to wish that this might be so, for he would not have been drawn to her without that fear and that hatred, just as his associates the oilmen had been drawn to the ancient deaths, the sulfurous black-green pools and vats.
The white room felt alien and yet familiar to him. Either way, it felt as if he fit it, at this point and time in his life, fit it as comfortably as if it had been made for him, or he for it.
He had not felt fearlessness in a long time, and sitting in the white room, staring down at the town that he thought had finally awakened, he realized that at some near level, he was not, or once had not been, all that different from her: that he might once have been as frightened of the future, and a world without her, as she had been of the past and the present.
I knew how to be fearless, he thought, remembering those days spent in pursuit of her heart. Do I know how to be fearful?
Like Max Omo, or any other of the millions of men and women who had ever walked the face of the earth—like Clarissa herself—he had run for cover, had allowed himself to go underground, before his time was due.
After visiting a few offices, Richard was able to find some of the men and women with whom he had once done business—a drilling contractor, a land manager, an engineer, a production geologist—though even among these familiar haunts, there were not many whom he remembered, or who remembered him, or him and Clarissa.
The turnover was high, out in the desert. He finally found someone who was able to tell him that her parents had died; but as to Clarissa, no one had heard, no one knew. No, to the best of their knowledge, she had never come back. No, they couldn’t think of anyone he might be able to ask.
The people he questioned regarded him with pity. You were lucky to have her, their looks told him plainly. You will never have her again.
Richard called on Herbert Mix, wandered by the old skull gatherer’s warehouse later that afternoon. It was the first time in nearly a decade in which he had not worked two days in a row, and he liked it.
Mix was out in the backyard, having just laundered his sequined suit, and was hanging it to dry on the clothesline. He had not sold a dousing rod in years, his willow garden was overgrown, an impenetrable rainforest that he kept watering anyway. Inca doves, bright tanagers, buntings, and vireos nested in its farthest reaches, and odd-gaited neighborhood cats, dingy and pink-eyed, their brains cooked to delirium by the desert heat, skulked the perimeters.
Mix carried a BB gun, a toy rifle on a sling, and whenever he spotted one of the marauders he would set his cane aside, lower himself to the ground like an ancient commando, and lob a stinging round at the cat before levering in another round and firing again. His aim was good, and the first time Richard witnessed this—standing at the back gate, unannounced—he understood why the cats were limping, and wondered idly why Mix did not just kill them, if he was so intent on protecting the precious songbirds, but then understood: the old man was lonelier than ever. Not crazy, just lonely; and watching him, Richard felt for the first time ever a touch of fear, a questioning about his own distant Clarissa-less future, and wondered if perhaps he should have stayed down in the Sierra Occidentals with Sy Craven and the others, where at least he’d had a home, a routine, and a future, even if it was no future at all. China, and Africa, and relentless root-hog grubbing: more oil, then death.
Herbert Mix pushed himself back into a standing position, then limped over to where he had stung the cat and
scratched through the sand with the tip of his cane, his gimlet eyes squinting. Spying the pellet, he bent down and picked it up, polished the tiny gold piece on his shirtfront, then put it back in his ammo bag, more frugal than ever; as if by a fierce enough accounting, the old man might be able to stave off his immense fears, which might not even have been those of the simple void of death, Richard saw now, and a loss of all the senses, but amounted instead to some darker reckoning, both of the void below and the realm above, where time was wasted, less significant even than the sand sifting through his fingers.
And disturbed suddenly by such a sobering interpretation of the world—Is this what Clarissa had seen, Richard wondered, and if so, how had she remained sane?—Richard was about to turn away and depart, unannounced, leaving the old man free to grub for his spent BBs in peace.
But from the corner of his eye—hungering, as ever, for a passing-through treasure seeker, a pigeon, a mark—Herbert Mix caught the glimpse of movement, and waved to Richard, and hurried over to greet him, recognizing him instantly, as a father might his son; as if ten years was nothing.
Believing, perhaps, that there had been only a dull cessation in the relationship, and that Richard had returned with some grand object of commerce to trade or sell to Herbert Mix: a treasure all the more rare and wonderful for the waiting.
