by Rick Bass
Other puppets ascended only to fall over on their backs as they settled back down. Still others—the majority—were drawn toward the pit, canting and tipping toward it as if pulled there by some unavoidable summons; and encountering the cooler, denser air above the pit, they hovered longest of all, before toppling in.
They fell upon one another, a cascade of burning puppets, sailfish upon rhinoceros upon hawk upon Comanche, with the burning outlines of these apparitions alarming, surely, to any rigworkers who might be staring off into the desert in their direction.
The heat from the burning paper and cardboard was terrific, as was the roar of the flames. The heat singed the hair of the onlookers, curled the hair on the backs of the men’s hands, and melted the tips of the eyebrows of any who did not step away quickly enough.
With rakes and shovels, the onlookers shoved those fallen puppets which had not yet made it into the pit down into the bed of fire, with rafts of spark and ember showering upward in brilliant fountains each time a new body part was added to the brew: the wing of a raven, the head of an antelope. Herbert Mix himself shoveled in the leg of a miner, wobbly on his own good leg.
The cremation was so intense that it fused the sand into a giant, iridescent, swirl-streaked glassine bowl, which would, in coming years, hold water, with bushes and then small trees growing up around it to provide shade and prevent evaporation; and the children would come and swim there on hot days, and would remember their earlier childhood.
That was all to come later. That night, as the puppets burned, and the old and glorious past fell away, the onlookers watched, fascinated by Beth’s wizardry, as the glowing pit below, a caldera of heat and color and noise, flashed and flamed and roared. The fire burned hot for a long time, a single giant glowing ingot, burning far longer than any of them would have guessed.
It continued to send up a single heated breath, like some collective final exhalation; but as it finally wavered, the onlookers were able to edge closer and peer back down into the glowing bowl of their making, and in the wormy traces and ruins they were sometimes able to make out the shadows and outlines, framed by the ashen lines of the cardboard’s corrugations, of certain of their creations: and they stared into this strange amalgam as if into a wishing-well mirror.
And in that viewing, they felt banded and bonded closer together—less the outcasts of Mormon Springs, and more than ever like community, family, clan—and although they all felt special, it was the children who felt this most keenly of all; and they felt assured and confident when they considered the future, now that they understood it could hold such marvels for them as Beth and her puppets.
It was a little lonely, after the last of the flames died down to glowing coals. The onlookers stood closer together, not for warmth but in affection—husbands and wives, parents and children, and the two lovers, Herbert Mix and Marie—and Beth herself felt the bittersweetness of it deepest of all. It was a feeling as if some good part of all of them was draining away back down into the sand. It was not the best part of them, however, and the emptiness they felt would be refilled and recharged—they each knew it—as if the going-away helped make space for the new and better part to come in.
Their bonfire had burned down. They gathered their shovels and rakes, their aluminum lawn chairs and ice chests, and loaded them into their trucks. Beth was leaving soon—the eastbound to Houston came through just before midnight; the next morning, at sunrise, she would transfer to New Orleans, then north, back to Philadelphia—and she told the children that she hated goodbyes, that she would come back and see them, and that she wanted to tell them goodbye here in the desert, that she did not want a big farewell at the train station.
She felt her own heart detaching, even as they clung to her and pleaded with her to stay just one more day. She felt herself ascending, burning, toppling, as she stepped into the chamber of belief that it was better to leave immediately, and to remember their time sweetly, even as she knew she would likely never return to Odessa.
She gave each of them fierce hugs, then stepped away, though still they followed her as if in a parade, and hugged her again and again. The smaller ones, Zachary and a girl named Sarah, made a game of wrapping their arms around her thin ankles, each of them a Lilliputian attaching to Gulliver, and she felt herself having to detach even further than she had intended: and though not in a panic, not too close to sadness or sorrow yet, she nonetheless felt herself tensing, and twisted in the children’s grasp to find Herbert Mix, who had volunteered his truck.
It had been decided, agreed, Richard would drive her out to the station—there would be no grief, no attachment, there; a perfect stranger, a chauffeur—and now she found Richard’s eyes and pleaded for help and understanding, and he went and got her two small duffel bags (one of personal articles, clothing and an extra pair of high-topped tennis shoes, the other a larger, heavier bag of puppet gear: coiled ziplines, PA-28 staplers, X-Acto blades, paintbrushes) and transferred them to Herbert Mix’s truck. Mix would ride home with Marie and Annie, would stay out at their house that evening.
It was hard even for Richard to watch—he who had no investment in the leave-taking. They simply would not let her go. Their parents intervened, but no sooner had they succeeded in separating Zachary’s and Sarah’s grasp than other children rushed in, playing tug of war with Beth, even the older children, and Annie and her friend Maeve; and in the end it was Ruth who had to negotiate the departure, explaining to the children that she would ride out to the train station with Beth to tell her goodbye, but that they had to leave immediately, or else Beth would miss her train.
“She’s anxious to get back to her home, and her family,” Ruth said, “and her family is anxious to see her.”
Still the children protested, though they finally released her—satisfied or at least reassured that she would receive a proper farewell with Ruth accompanying her—and the three of them climbed into the old truck and pulled away; and only then, with the safety of the desert’s darkness swallowing them, and the night air swirling in through the open windows, as warm as if at the ocean, did Beth feel herself successfully detach, able to step away without heartbreak.
She laughed—she was sitting by the passenger-side window, Ruth was in the middle—looked over at Ruth’s swirling hair, slapped her hand a couple of times on the truck’s window jamb, and said, “Good job, Teacher.”
The old feel of freedom, the old release, returning to her as it always did, a feeling like running for the open sea; though some certain times, it was harder to pull away. And yet, she had done it again.
They passed one after another of the flaring gas wells, the flames wavering like far-spaced candles on an immense birthday cake. “You drilled all these?” Beth asked, leaning forward to look at Richard—clearly more pleased with the nighttime appearance of them than by any intimations of material wealth they might foretell below—and Richard laughed and looked out to the horizon—trying to remember the outlines of the buried fields below—and corrected her, and told her that he had probably only drilled or worked on about a quarter of them.
“Cool,” Beth said, and they rode a while in silence, Ruth holding her hair back from her face with one hand, before Ruth said, “Good, you’re not responsible for all the cave-ins,” and Richard, unsure of whether she was joking or serious, chose to perceive the former, and laughed and said, “No, only about a quarter of them,” and they rode on some more in silence.
They were the only ones at the station. The conductor had a habit of not stopping, if he saw no cars or trucks in the parking lot; and by the way the train came roaring in, it was clear that he had not expected to encounter anyone this evening. He piled on the brakes, the squeal of steel caliper on drum shrieking from a thousand wheels, sparks tumbling from them, with the scent of burning railside cinder and the scorch of coal smoke acrid in the desert air.
In departing, Beth showed little emotion; she hugged both Ruth and Richard, though without the passion with which she’d e
nlivened her King Kong and flying elephant. She promised again to come back sometime, and then greeted the conductor (who appeared ready to be angry about something, until he saw how small and alone she was), handing him one of her bags as she climbed the iron steps, through the iron darkness, the coal-black sky silhouetted by the jewelry of stars.
And reaching the top step, without looking back—to Ruth and Richard, it seemed that the set of her mouth was cast in a straight line—Beth stepped into the horizontal husk of train.
She took her seat. The train hissed and yowled, began to bull forward. She leaned her face against the glass, eager to see the desert at night. During her entire five-week sojourn, she had gone nowhere other than into Odessa for supplies, then back to Mormon Springs; and as the train accelerated into its soothing, clicking glide, she handled in her memory those five weeks as a fossil collector working at night might examine with his or her hands the ridges and indentations of specimens just discovered.
She watched, dreamed, remembered. She considered, and reconsidered, each child, each adult. As if all of them, for that short space of time, had been her creation, a product of her shaping. As if she had been, for that time, responsible for them all.
Ruth and Richard, gathered to bid her farewell, saw her light-limned face against the window and waved. In the darkness, Beth did not see them, and they both experienced a gutted, empty feeling as the train pulled away—Ruth, in particular, bore it heavily, saddened not just by the loss of Beth from their lives, but by the hard reality of the return of the hammer-and-tong work that would be required of her again, without the benefit of the artist-in-residence.
Once alone with Richard, she presumed that, because he was her own age, and because he was a man, he would try to court her while he was in Odessa. She was not in the mood for such a thing. She had her fourteen children, her furious desire to remake the world, and to help coax a blossoming love in each of them that would last for all their lives—fourteen children multiplied by another eighty years each, calculated to eleven hundred and twenty years of pure love—and though she was not a man-hater in the least, she had no intention of pursuing, or being pursued by, a man outside her faith, nor any man, right now.
Show me a man who can compete with, who can create or provide, eleven hundred and twenty years of love, she might have said, when asked about the subject.
And perhaps that was the sadness she felt, on the drive back to Mormon Springs. Beth had given that kind of love, that joy and spontaneity and creativity—call it a year and a half of love—but now it had been taken away, pulled away, and there was an emptiness within.
On the other side of the truck, she imagined that she could feel Richard, who was driving, preparing to speak; considering his approach.
For a moment, in her emptiness, she thought, Oh, let him try, what would it hurt? I’m empty. But she thought then of the work and challenge before her, and chose instead to begin fashioning a defense, even before his sexual gambit had officially been launched.
“I came out here to teach,” she said, anticipating his first question, the lame one with which everyone led, male or female, young or old. Then she adjusted the message quickly. “I’ve never married, and may never. I’ve never found anyone brave enough, or active enough. Everyone’s too complacent,” she said, “too easygoing. There’s no rage, nor exultation—nothing,” she said. “I guess that’s what attracts me to the children—they’re still so whole.” She pretended to change the subject, then.
“What about you?” she asked, almost challenging him, and paused, letting her words hang, so that it might seem she was asking why he was so damned complacent. Why he was willing to let the world, and the river-flow of time, happen to him, rather than him happening to the world. “What brings you out here?” she asked finally, a little more gently, cutting him a bit of slack, which surprised her; it was not her way, with adults. “Oil, right?”
Unsure of what bee had gotten in her bonnet, and feeling somehow scolded—a sentiment all the more troubling for the sense he had that she was correct in scolding him, as he himself was not quite sure what his offense had been—he said nothing, but instead just drove, and pondered her litany.
Richard thought about Clarissa: how, ten years earlier, it would be he and she who would be in this old truck, traveling over this same old country; and he wondered again, for the hundredth time, what she would be like, what she was like, now, at thirty. How she compared, for instance, to this interesting woman beside him, who clearly was more engaged and more caring, and perhaps more passionate, and yet who—for no reason that he could discern—seemed almost to be attacking him.
He continued to ride in silence. When he finally spoke, all he said was, “Maybe you should consider not being so harsh. I don’t think you can always tell who’s complacent, and who’s not, just by looking.” He turned to watch her for a moment, as he drove—examining her now: and her face burned as she remembered the times that she herself had been judged in such a manner.
She could think of no argument. She rode in silence, feeling completely stripped of her defense; though unlike the gutted, empty loneliness that had accompanied Beth’s leaving, this was not a bad feeling. If anything, she felt lighter, and they rode comfortably, breeze-stirred with the gas flares on either side of them acting as familiar guides—as if it were a lane they were traveling that they had not been on in a long time.
They found themselves upon it, and there was an absence of fear. It was comfortable.
Maybe she is just beyond those flames, Richard thought, considering Clarissa. Maybe she is out there in the darkness, biding her time. I will wait here for her a while, he thought. I’ll wait here, just hang out here for a while, and wait for her to step back in from that darkness.
As they drew closer to the little town, they began to see the silhouettes of what they thought at first were animals running down the road—stray range cattle, spooked by their approach, they assumed—but saw then that they were runners, football players scattered here and there, training not in any official regimen of their coaches’ making, but simply running on their own, running miles and miles in the hours long before their 4:30 A.M. scheduled training: and although Ruth and Richard both thought they had already seen the full breadth of the players’ devotion to their god, they were surprised and troubled by the revelation of these previously unknown depths, and they passed by them uneasily, feeling now more like travelers in a foreign country than residents in their own land.
If the players were running so maniacally as a symptom of love, Richard reasoned, they would not hide in the cool of night, they would haul themselves down the road in day as well as night, hurling themselves out into the desert as old Herbert Mix had done, in younger days. It was the fear of failure that drove them, masquerading as love; it was not, they both saw, the incendiary thing itself. It was just old-fashioned fear, dug down extra-deep, as if into some farther reservoir; it was not the other thing, the mythic thing, the thing people clamored for and believed they deserved.
Richard and Ruth came into the sleeping town of Odessa, passing down Main Street, the town scoured and sterile again, as if no parade had ever occurred—and then they were out the other side, as if having traveled through a husk or tube, and were back out into the desert, driving on the short distance to the outcast village of Mormon Springs. As they drove, they could see now, farther out into the desert, at the end of long pale driveways, the occasional small clapboard ranch houses, yellow window squares still burning, one or two homes every mile or so, and they knew that these were the residences of families who had participated in the spectacle, still too stimulated to sleep: as if a comet or some other natural phenomenon had passed through, compelling them to remain awake far into the night, visiting about it and reliving it in the telling and retelling.
They passed half a dozen such houses, and then a dozen more, scattered in all directions to the east of Odessa, on the road to Mormon Springs and beyond, and it seemed to both of th
em to signify a kind of secret society, a clear demarcation between those who were asleep and those who were not.
Like angels of Passover, Ruth and Richard traveled farther, east of Odessa, noting who had participated and who had not; and when they drove by Marie’s house, they saw that not only was her light still on, but that Herbert Mix and Marie were sitting on the front porch swing in which Annie usually curled up and read, in the afternoon, waiting out the heat of the day.
Richard slowed down and almost stopped, but then thought better of it, not wanting to intrude on their privacy, and continued on. It seemed unimaginable to him that an old man and an old woman would have anything left to visit about, at two o’clock in the morning; and when he remarked to Ruth how he found this to be rather wonderful, she shot him a look that he could not comprehend, but which seemed surprisingly to contain a mixture of disbelief and scorn.
“They’re just people, is all,” she said, “like you or me, or like two kids, for that matter. And the world is still filled with interesting things. Why shouldn’t they be talking at two in the morning?”
Richard couldn’t be sure whether she was a closet romantic or if the source of her anger was that he considered such a thing to be unusual. They were pulling up to her darkened little house. The schoolhouse lay a hundred yards farther on. He tried to explain himself, tried to agree with her.
“That’s my point,” he said. “The fact is, most people don’t, and so it seemed wonderful to me that—”
“Don’t try and brownnose,” she advised him, and got out of the truck. Not sure exactly where she stood, but knowing that above all costs, she had to protect herself.
She smiled politely, thanked him, and shut the truck’s door, walked up the flagstone walkway to the dark house, and once inside, did not turn the lights on, but went straight to bed, after slipping off her sandals, jeans, and shirt, turning the fan on, and washing the dust from her face, arms, and chest with a washcloth.
