All the Land to Hold Us

by Rick Bass

  And for a moment it seemed that Mix was caught in the ten-years-past, for he looked around as if expecting to see Richard’s partner with him. He even inquired after her, unable to quite remember her name, though certainly remembering her image. “Where is—she?” Mix asked, faltering over the name—“your friend?”—and Richard’s face fell as he answered, “I was hoping you might know.”

  They sat on the back patio listening to the cheeps of the birds hidden back in the willows, drinking the iced sun tea that Herbert Mix had made that morning (stirring so much sugar into the pitcher that the last five or six spoonfuls did not dissolve, but remained on the bottom, gritty as sand), while Mix filled Richard in on all that had gone on in town in the last ten years, which was next to nothing; indeed, the day’s parade, and the new school out at Mormon Springs, were about the only highlights.

  There had been more drilling going on, there would always be more drilling—there were more caverns opening up out in the desert, abysses and sinkholes, and people’s water wells were getting lower and sandier, and were starting to taste sulfurous in this, the eighth year of the drought—but the land had been through drought before, Herbert Mix said, and would be all right again after a couple of years of good rain.

  “Not this year,” he said, looking up at the great blue above, the heat almost nauseating, “but next.”

  He changed the subject away from the meteorological, then, and rather than veering toward the entrepreneurial, as he would have in the old days, he began to speak of something else.

  “I’ve got a friend,” he said, delighted to have the opportunity to talk about her.

  And what else might he have told Richard? That his hungers were abating? That he was happy? What world revolution or climactic upheaval could be more interesting, immediate, or necessary than that?

  “I go over there two, three times a week,” he said. His heart leaping, wishing it were six or seven—so little time remaining!—and yet, the two or three times a week was enough that it seemed he was somehow with her even in her, Marie’s, absence; even in their absence, Marie and the young girl Annie, of whom he was also proud, informing Richard that she was smart, quiet but smart.

  “There’s an artist in town,” Herbert Mix said. “That was her parade you saw this morning. She’s leaving tonight on the train. We’re having a party for her, a celebration before she goes. You’re welcome to come, it’ll be fun. We’re going to burn the puppets. It’s something she says she does after every performance.” A pause, then, after this lengthy run of words, to stand before the nutmeat, the true essence of the day.

  “Marie will be there, you can meet Marie,” he said. The pleasure of saying her name twice. And were he to say it a third time, the pleasure, the dizziness he felt, would be no less. Richard could see it in Herbert Mix’s eyes, could see it in his general posture, could hear it in his voice, could feel it radiating from his mere presence, like a shout.

  Goddamn you lucky savage, Richard thought, and was both saddened and stricken to think that his own road ahead might be as lengthy, improbable, and lonely.

  Richard turned and looked back up toward the bluffs east of town, the Castle Gap country, as if waiting. As if she were due back on some certain schedule, and as if at last he understood that the form of the land would, must, deliver her back to him.

  “I’d love to meet her,” he told the old treasure seeker. “Where, and what time?”

  The burning took place out near one of the old well sites. The puppets were arranged around the edge of one of the sinkholes, and a bonfire was already burning when Richard and Herbert Mix arrived, so that at first, from a distance, they thought they were late, and that the puppets were already aflame. They rode out in Herbert Mix’s old truck, suffering stiffly but without complaint every jounce and jolt, and in their ride, and in the old man’s calming mix of eagerness and peacefulness, his relaxation at moving closer toward the company of his beloved, Richard again felt a twinge of envy: and in the ride out to the party, he understood more about the old bone collector’s bliss than he could ever have gleaned from awkward conversation.

  The stars burned above them like sparks from the campfire itself; and feeling the cooler air of night rushing in through the open windows, and looking up at the familiar clockwork of constellations, Richard relaxed too, and felt himself for the first time to be in a place more like home: felt the curve of the earth accepting him, as might the flow of some powerful river.

  They wound down sandy roads toward the distant fire, the color of it a brighter yellow than the orange flares of the gas wells scattered across the desert. Richard found himself remembering the specifics of each wellhead they passed, the abandoned dry holes as well as the productive, snake-hiss pumping oil wells and the silent hydrant-like wellheads of the gas producers. He remembered being out on the well-logging trucks at each location they passed, midwifing each well into existence, the life or death of the well to be decided by each logging job, and by his interpretation of the data.

  He found himself remembering with remarkable intensity the squiggly lines of electrocardiograph-like responses of the logging tool on the computer’s screen as the radioactive tool was lowered and then raised slowly back up through the geological column of the just-drilled hole: little blebs and nips of electrical response revealing hidden ledges and beaches and old creeks and canyons thousands of feet below; hidden oil and gas, the treasure, and lenses of water, sometimes salty (Devonian) and other times fresh (Pennsylvanian), always the enemy, always indicating failure.

  And in the remembering of so many tiny geological details—the intimacy of specific sand grains from various core samples, the sand from long ago held in his bare hands and rubbed between his fingers to gauge grain size and hence perhaps porosity, and sniffed for traces of hydrocarbons, and even tasted with his tongue to determine the presence of silt or clay—he remembered also the often-nameless well operators and drillers and roughnecks who had been out on the rigs helping him deliver each of those wells.

  He remembered the taste of 4:00 a.m. scorched coffee—always, it seemed the wells were delivered at night, gave up their secrets at night—and the odor of the workers’ harsh cigarettes mixing with the even more astringent eye-stinging odor of the ammonia that was used to make the blue-line prints of the electrical logs, so that Richard could spread them out on the little table inside the logging van as if they were the thing itself, rather than a representation.

  And with his calculator and various formulas, he had begun his computations that would help decide where into the subsurface world he had fallen, and what was to be done about it: whether to push on, drilling deeper, or to turn back, and walk away.

  It was like the dreamworld, the otherworld, that Herbert Mix was in right now, as they headed farther out into the desert, as leisurely in their night drive as a pleasure boat chugging out of a harbor, with all of a grand day’s trip lying ahead. It was similar, that deliciously imagined underworld, but it was not quite as good. It was but a substitute for the world above, and Richard, riding out to the bonfire and the burning of the puppets, felt as if he was perched on some ledge midway between the two worlds, the higher and the lower, and yet that he had no route, no path, to take him from the one to the other; that after thirty-three years, he was finally stranded.

  And realizing this, he tried not to panic, but leaned back in the seat of old Herbert Mix’s ancient truck, and tried to let the shape of the land and the force of time deliver him to where he needed to be.

  He knew Clarissa would not be at this party, he acknowledged his fear that he might never see her again, and yet he found the courage to continue to hope that he might somehow again; and from behind the steering wheel, old Herbert Mix hummed quietly, both hands on the wheel, with the bonfire growing finally closer.

  The little handful of puppet-children and their parents were already gathered, roasting hot dogs and marshmallows over the fire—half a dozen cars and trucks were parked around the throw of li
ght—and perhaps Richard might have recognized the girl as his own immediately, had he spied her out on her own, separate from the small crowd.

  As it was, when he first viewed her, she was surrounded by others, in the midst of three generations of girls and women, standing with one of her classmates, her closest friend, a quiet, younger girl named Maeve, and Beth, the puppeteer, barely twenty, and Ruth, almost thirty, and then Marie, whose silver hair shone in the firelight, and whom Richard intuited immediately was Herbert Mix’s paramour.

  They went straight away toward the assembled group and were handed paper cups of warm apple cider, which Beth acknowledged was an old pagan-Yankee tradition of hers, one that was necessary to accompany any and all of her puppet-burnings. She made it sound as if she had been doing it all her life, and when Richard asked when she had gotten started, she told him that she had been making them and playing with them for as long as she could remember, but that her first professional job had not come until she was thirteen.

  “I had a happy childhood,” she said, laughing—as candid with the stranger, Richard, as if, by virtue of his having made it out into the desert, he was one of them, rather than an outsider—as if she had worked with him, too, for all the long hours of each of those five weeks, as she had with the children and their parents. “I had a great family, no neuroses or anything, but I don’t know, I just was really into making up all these weird worlds, and surrounding myself with all of these really weird creatures.”

  Her eyes were gleaming in the push-and-pull light of the fire, she was still riding the ecstasy of the post-performance high, as were the children and the parents and townsfolk who had witnessed the spectacle; and her thralldom in a place of otherworldness so reminded Richard of his own comfort and joy found in exploring other worlds that he was both attracted to her and yet somehow unsettled, for how could one dare or even desire to draw too near to one so like one’s self?

  Still, he found himself thinking, How you would love to know of the ammonites, the giant horned cephalopods lying up in the hills, just beyond this fire—and he marveled for the thousandth time at the confluence of fate that had led him to the place and time of loving Clarissa, rather than any other, rather than all others. She, who had cared almost nothing for such things, or even, it seemed, for the world itself. But almost: he could not shake the feeling that he had almost convinced her to love the world; to dare to love the world.

  He should have noticed Annie then, should have caught a glimpse of her and had his head turned by a shock of recognition, or invisible current—she even looked like he had looked, at that age—but he had not thought about what he looked like as a child in a long time, nor was he even now a devotee of mirrors, so that even if she had been his twin, it might have meant nothing to him—though still somehow, standing so close to her, he should have known; should have come up from the lower world enough to take the fuller measure of things.

  Instead, he turned to meet Marie—Herbert Mix was introducing him—and then the teacher, Ruth. He was put off by Ruth’s guardedness, her defensiveness, and its implicit assumption that because he was a stranger, he might end up being like one of the townspeople who had judged and then turned against her—that he might be one of those who would get in the way of her life’s passion, of teaching, and of making a difference in young lives.

  Then he was being introduced to the other parents and their children, with old Herbert Mix continuing the introductions; and the others accepted him immediately, for that reason. Richard saw how Herbert Mix had outlasted his eccentricity, had ridden it like a mount to some far enough point where it had become a form of respectability—that the old treasure hunter had become like a geological fixture, and had altered the community around him, forcing them to respect him simply by virtue of his endurance, having prevailed over those who had once ridiculed him.

  Only one of the parents asked Richard what he was doing there, and when Herbert Mix interjected that he was a geologist, that was all the answer that was needed, though it seemed to him that there might have been a thing like pity in the polite smile that followed. Oh, yes, a geologist. We know about the indefatigable and insatiable hearts of geologists.

  He stared at Herbert Mix and Marie for a moment, the old gentleman’s arm resting lightly around her waist in a way that was both bold and shy, then looked over at the schoolteacher again, caught just a glimpse of her looking quickly away.

  Of course she was wary of him, she was right to assume he might have come to interrupt her life somehow, or to take something away: she was listening to her instincts, and her instincts told her to beware; that he had about him the residue, the aura, of taking.

  It bothered him that she perceived him so, and he wondered how he might convince her otherwise.

  Perhaps I can work with the children, he thought, perhaps I can come up to the school and teach them about geology, and the place where they live.

  Beth had detached herself from the parents and had called the children to her, crouched amidst them as if they were all football players in a huddle. A couple of the smaller ones appeared near tears, and the older ones were somber, as Beth explained how the puppet-burning was to proceed.

  “It’s supposed to be a celebration,” she said. She was herself but a few years older than the oldest among them, and diminutive, lean as a boy; with her short curly hair, from a distance, she might have been mistaken for an elfin boy.

  “I’ll light each puppet,” she explained, and then turned to address Zachary, the kindergartner, and raised a finger—“Never play with matches. And then once they’re all burning, I’ll give a signal, and we’ll each use a stick to push our puppets into the Great Pit of Everlasting Purge and Rejuvenation, where they will be purified and preserved forever as memories in our hearts.

  “You will always remember this,” she said, speaking to all of them now. “It’s human nature to want to hold on to something you’ve worked so hard on, and created”—she glanced over at Herbert Mix and then at Richard, and smiled—“but the spirits of our puppets have fulfilled their human obligations, they’ve brought us joy and happiness, and now it’s time to seal them in our hearts so that those feelings will remain in us forever.”

  She looked around at each of the children, and at the pit that had been dug for the ritual. “If we try to hold on to them, they’ll just end up in attics and basements, in lofts and garages, all dusty and cobwebbed, dull and cracked and heat-stricken,” she said. “Their power and beauty will leave them. We have to resurrect their power to thrill us one more time,” she said. “We have to have a finale.”

  The children nodded, not understanding, and perhaps not even believing such things: but they trusted her. Richard saw that Ruth was smiling, and that he might have misjudged her: she was not all hard, she possessed some softness. He saw the quiet, serious girl, Annie, tucked in tight against her, the teacher’s arm folded over her chest pulling her in closer, and he thought, Oh, her daughter.

  “All right,” Beth said, “remember this,” and she led them over to the trucks parked next to the abyss and pulled out their puppets, each to his and her own. The children brought the creations over to the pit and arranged them around its edges, buffalo and demon and alien and Kiowa, Comanche and heron and raven and hawk, each puppet towering like a stone megalith, realistic in silhouette.

  A stillness fell over the little audience as the play of light from the bonfire wavered back and forth across the artworks in a way that brought them to life, seemed to be propelling them forward now into the world under their own desires and momentums. As if now they must be destroyed, in order for the memory of them to be owned: in order to prevent the puppets from becoming their own things—mortal, and, as Beth had explained, prone, then, to disintegration.

  The children did not understand, but trusted her.

  The puppets needed no gasoline in order to burn. Each child made a little setting of twigs and crumpled newspaper at the base of their puppet. Beth gave a brief invocatio
n—“Thank you for the pleasure you have brought us,” she told the puppets, and then, turning to the makers, “Thank you for what you have created, and brought to our hearts”—and then she knelt and lit one of her own puppets, the divine and gigantic King Kong, and the other puppetmakers did the same.

  On the other side of King Kong, Herbert Mix and Marie were igniting the buffalo, and all else around the pit, the mammoth puppets were becoming quickly shrouded in flame.

  It seemed to them that the puppets were stepping, of their own volition, into chambers of flame, and it was a surprise to all who witnessed it, for if such yearning existed in the puppets, then did it not also exist in the hearts of their makers?

  All around the pit, puppets plumed in wreaths of bright flame burned in hues of magenta, cerulean, and chartreuse as the paint cracked and flaked and then vaporized. It was a rainbow of fire, a kaleidoscope of fire—Richard looked over at Beth and saw that she was watching as if hypnotized, her face fire-rimmed with an expression of Technicolored rapture—and then, just as Beth had hoped, the puppets began to ascend.

  It was a phenomenon that occurred only infrequently, in the puppet-burnings. The conditions had to be near-perfect: a calm, cooling night, stable barometric pressure, and low humidity, so that the puppets burned hot and quickly—and when it worked, the flaming puppets were lifted a short distance above the ground, like hot-air balloons, as their hollow husks filled with the combustible gases, and as the heat of their self-made flames rose all around them, in the same manner in which smoke and heat swirl into the updrafts of a chimney.

  One by one, all around the pit, the puppets began to hop and tilt and lift in a syncopated dance. Some of them floated several feet into the air and appeared to hover, stricken or perhaps exalted, seized, even if only briefly, by the current of life, before settling back down upon the ground, where, their gases spent, they began to crumple and shrink to blackening char.