by Rick Bass
She was mildly displeased with how she had treated the visitor, and it took her a long time to get to sleep. She lay listening to the fan, and felt the waste of her body, unloved and unknown, like some map of little-known territory, across and through which no traveler, no explorer, had been in a long time. Her body—for now, for these brief few years—as real and finite as were her dreams of purity and passion and nurturing for the children abstract and amorphous. Why, she wondered, is there not time or space in the world for both?
Richard drove home. The lights at Marie’s house were now off, the sleepers dreaming puppet dreams. He headed west back into Odessa, left the truck at Herbert Mix’s museum, and walked the half block down to his apartment, climbed the wooden outside steps to the loft, even though there were no tenants below. Not wanting to pass through the empty shell of the interior, but desiring, like all of the various frightened dreamers, to remain somewhat outside.
He stood on the landing at the top of the stairs for some time, hesitating to go inside: invigorated by the passage of Beth, and by the newness of the turn his life had taken. He looked down on the sleeping town, with neither risk nor ambition rising from it, and he thought he felt again a stirring of what Clarissa must have felt, long ago.
Mormon Springs, on the other hand, seemed to him to be a community worth knowing, sufficiently outside the placidity of Odessa. Maybe not east of Eden, but newer, finer, rawer, edgier.
Ruth was just covering herself, trying to put up a wall without first ascertaining whether he was a threat. He laughed, looking down at the empty street across which earlier that day the elephant and all his fantastic kin had flown. Standing again in Clarissa’s old town, and looking down upon the space where she no longer was, made him remember her all the more, and want her again even more intensely than ever: but in the meantime, here was this interesting woman who had not run from this place, but who had instead sought it out. He still wanted Clarissa, but at the same time, he was intrigued by the schoolteacher; and in her resistance, there was a part of him, the geologist, the taker, that found her irresistible.
10
THE CHILD WAS NOT so much standoffish and aloof as she was absorbed in a deeper world, dwelling for hours in a world others were not privy to, and sometimes for days and even weeks. She was a special project—burdened with an intelligence that had threatened her teacher in Odessa, and which even Ruth found challenging and sometimes problematic—but she had a stubborn sweetness within her, too, Richard saw, the first time he came into the classroom to talk to the students about geology.
He had been told a little of Annie’s history by Herbert Mix. She had always been quiet and introspective, it seemed—but he could see the sweetness in the nine-year-old immediately, in a way that surprised him. It felt like a kind of clairvoyance, this instinctual knowing, and was of the sort that he usually experienced only with the earth, when drafting and assembling subterranean prospects, pursuing the old oil and gas.
He felt immediately, in this odd, underground perception, a close affinity with her. He could tell by the intensity of interest she directed toward objects and subjects, in her first moment’s examination of them, that yearning was the source of that intensity and intelligence, and that when she did not perceive like-in-kind being returned, she turned away, and descended.
Of course the teacher in Odessa had not known what to do with her. Of course the parents of other children had been distressed by her. Of course they had believed the made-up stories cast by a bitter and puzzled few, the malicious surface-dwellers with too much time on their hands, and the inability to descend into and explore the lands that Annie was so comfortable frequenting.
And yet—she was only nine. Even as the deeper, older world was familiar to her, as were the lands of calculus and trigonometry, and the terrain and territory of Shakespeare and Latin, the sinuosity and contour of language, and the logic of chemistry, physics, and biology, the rest of the world was entirely new to her: subtleties and nuances, small curious things such as, again, the surface choreography of manners.
When something bored her, she turned away.
She spoke occasionally, and when stressed or troubled or confined, communicated in emotional truths, rather than planing along on the surface of facts. Of course the teacher in Odessa had not known what to do with her. Of course the town had not.
The fossils were a big hit. All the students regarded them as treasure, the day he passed them out in class, lecturing on each one, and detailing, on the blackboard, the chronology and duration of various geologic epochs—Silurian, Ordovician, Devonian—in ways that the school in Odessa would never have allowed. Demonology, they would have cried, heresy, hypothesis, blasphemy.
The children handled with reverence the bones of their faraway ancestors. It was too much to contemplate, the distance and journey between then and now. It made so much sense to them to break it down into seven workdays. Neither side was right, neither side was wrong: it was all here in the geological record, as plain to see as the typeset characters in a book. The establishment of the firmament, the separation of stars and moon from earth, the Great Flood; the Age of Reptiles, the Age of Fishes, the Age of Fruits and Flowers, and lastly, and so late, the Dawn of Man, birthed from a land of fire and ice, volcanoes and glaciers, beneath a mysterious sun that summoned each year, as if in the delicate greenhouse bubble of a dream, the shouting vegetative tropics, the poison-cleansing oxygen-producing botanical uproar of the world.
It was all the same, he said, for the benefit of any Christians among them, as well as for Ruth, unsure of what sect or cult of Mormonism to which she might belong: all the same, whether hardrock geological fact, evidence, or emotional truth buried sometimes far below.
It was one of the things he liked best about looking for oil and gas, this rare overlay of truth and fact—the emotional truth, able to be held physically, tangibly, in the palm of one’s hand, as proof—and as he talked in this manner, the students listened attentively, having never consciously considered such distinctions, but willing to consider them now—willing to expand their boundaries of perception further. And among them, Annie listened most carefully of all, though she was guarded with, even enigmatic in, her response to the lecture.
And when Richard told the children to choose which fossils they wanted to keep and take home, they were thrilled, clutching the stony bones and carcasses of ammonites five hundred million years old, and Richard promised to take them up into the mesa soon, to teach them how to conduct their own excavations.
He was not offering this in exchange for any tenderness on Ruth’s part, but neither did it pass unobserved by him that she did seem to be softening her stance toward him somewhat, viewing him as a possible asset rather than a danger. Beginning, perhaps, to see him for who he was; beginning to dare to consider looking—even if only in a glance, at first—beneath the surface.
The other children were parceling out their fossils, debating and negotiating, selecting and trading them like baseball cards. Annie had already chosen hers—a single snail-sized trilobite, one of the rarest and most ornamented. In all their months of searching, he and Clarissa had not found more than a dozen of that particular species, and it pleased him that Annie’s hand had gone straight to it.
He noticed Annie beholding him, fixing him with her eyes, and sensed that she was about to ask him something about the subject at hand, the fossils—some point of theological contention, he might have guessed, based upon the directness of her gaze—but it turned out she was contemplating his previous statements, and had circled back to them after traveling some distance ahead, for she commented now, regarding his old affinity for searching for oil and gas: “The geologists have messed up our water. Could you find us new water?” As if it was her personal water that had been taken: hers and Marie’s, or hers and Marie’s and Ruth’s. Hers and the other children’s. Ah, Richard thought, and not unkindly, a public defender. But what is the source of her rage?
Even Ruth was non
plussed by the child’s near-accusation. “The children are concerned with groundwater contamination,” she said, her face flushing in a way that let Richard know that Ruth herself had not been sparing the whip with regard to her assessment of the takers, the corporate exploiters who had filed across these hallowed homelands. “We’ve been studying about desalinization in Israel,” she explained, and then, in her embarrassment, did a rare thing, something she abhorred in other adults.
“She probably means, ‘Do you know anything about desalinization, or is it a viable alternative for this region?’” And she was confused immediately as to why she was cutting Richard slack and why she was speaking for Annie. As were the children, when not two weeks before, she had been grilling Richard’s profession with fearsome incandescence. Lamenting the sulfurous taste of the drinking water in Odessa and, they claimed, even in certain wells in Mormon Springs, and the ever-expanding, pimply eruptions and collapses of sinkholes and caverns.
Annie glanced quickly at Ruth, surprised by this betrayal, but saw in a glimpse that Ruth was not responsible, that she knew not what she was doing, and she turned her attention back to Richard. “No,” she said, “I mean, if you know how to find oil and gas, can’t you also find water? Can you draw up some maps to show us where the water is—the good water—and then help us go after it and get it, before the oil companies poison that, too?”
A pall fell over the classroom. Richard felt his own face turning red, though with what emotion, he could not say. The feeling in the room was like the one that follows when an egg is dropped from a table and cracks on the floor; and that initial tension hung in the room, and then hung further, with no one, not even Ruth, knowing what to say. But as the tension began both to spread and dissipate, and the color began to leave Richard’s face, he found himself nodding slowly, adjusting himself to whatever scale of rage and reason and innocence she was operating on, and he heard himself saying, “Yes, I suppose I could. Would you like to help me, would you like to be my assistant, would you like to learn how?”
He had come across the border with nothing, had not envisioned disappearing beneath the surface again so soon, if ever. He had imagined himself taking a job in town, in some nongeological volunteer position, where he might be free to listen for and hear any whispers of her coming: a position up in a second-story building, where he might be able to watch the horizon for the first stirring of dust from any approaching traveler: continuing on about his work, but glancing up from time to time at that distant rise of dust and, once the plume was nearer, lifting a spyglass, a seafarer’s golden monocular, from his desk and peering through it, watching and waiting to see if the individual emerging from that far-off cloud of dust might eventually metamorphose into the one he awaited, like smoke becoming animate matter, spirit becoming flesh: and he would go to meet her.
Instead, he dove. As if unable to help himself, and knowing nothing else, he went into the oil and gas professional building, chatted with some of the newer geologists, who were only too eager to ask him for some tips about working in the area, and he came away with the loan of a handful of slide rules, some HB drafting pencils and erasers, long scrolls of blank linen, silken to the touch, on which they would sketch their contours as they probed and explored and remade the old world below; and best of all, when he explained that he would be working with schoolchildren, he was given, enthusiastically, full privilege to the electrical log library, so that he could go in after hours and work at the drafting tables on the seventh floor, accessing all the records from all the thousands of wells drilled in the area in past years. The control points of hard data, facts—anchorpoints for the dreams and desires to be imagined, and pursued—perhaps accurately, perhaps not—between those points.
He had to start slowly. It was not what he had intended doing, it was not how he had intended to spend his sojourn, his new life: returning yet again to the buried lands, and revisiting, remaking his own past. But he had told the girl yes, had told her teacher and the other children yes, and so once again he found himself pulled downward, with his back turned almost obstinately to the future.
To one who did not know him better, it might even have appeared that he was avoiding the future. To one who had not witnessed his bravery in the pursuit of Clarissa, it might have seemed that he was frightened of it.
The work went quickly. He often labored on through the night before napping in his loft, rising at intervals to scan the horizon, as if convinced through the faith and force of prophecy that that was where he would see her, that she would be returning on foot from some point beyond the desert.
He dreamed that it would be so, and yearned for it, until the image of it was so strong in his mind that it seemed sometimes it had already happened that way, and that he was only waiting for it to happen a second time.
He built a base map, reassembling from memory and from the data in the log library a geological foundation from which the children could work, and across which they could witness and begin to understand the flow of time, and the secret sequestering of various valuable things, the old treasures of oil and gas and water.
Sometimes as he was mapping he was so reminded of the old days that it seemed she had returned to him, was still with him: if not in the same room with him, at his elbow and peering over his shoulder at the terrain unscrolling, then just down the road a ways, still living in the little house with the screened-in porch upon which they took their leisurely weekend breakfasts.
When he finished the baseline maps, he scrolled them up and took them out to Mormon Springs for the children to work on. Sometimes he had second thoughts about what he was doing—What am I teaching them, he wondered, to take rather than to give? But they were engaged and enthused, and the raw knowledge, new knowledge, ran like a grassfire from one discipline to the next as they incorporated the math, and the biology of ancient life forms, and wove principles of oil production and engineering into the earth history lessons: and although Ruth’s opinions, and the foul taste of their drinking water, and the treacherous sump holes, had predisposed them to look less than kindly upon the petroleum industry, it was nonetheless a part of their own history; and they were able to use those lessons as a departure point for going back further, to the time of the salt traders, and the struggle for independence from Mexico, and further—to the Comanche wars—and then deeper still, to the prehistory of the Paleolithics, and then to the time of ice and mastodons, which seemed to them the most incredible thing of all.
And as the map progressed still further, he expanded his mapping sessions with the children into field trips, twice a week. It was one more trip per week than Ruth really should have budgeted for, but she loved the field trips, and the collecting and chronicling of their findings; and her pet, Annie, loved the excursions most of all, was more engaged than Ruth had ever seen her. Annie stayed with Richard, shadowing his every move, up on the mesa, and often spied the tiny traces of ancient life even before he did.
She was precise and diligent, practiced and cautious, in extracting them from their rock matrix and cleansing them, first by putting them in her mouth, and then in the bowl of dilute hydrochloric acid, brushing the sediment away with a wetted whisk; and sometimes, watching her reach for a certain fossil, up on the mesa—the shape of her hand, and the gesture of reach—the sudden current of longing, of grasping—Richard would feel disoriented, as if he had tumbled back in time not merely to the part where he and Clarissa had once been up on the bluff, but to some further time: one he had never inhabited, but which he somehow knew, and which had always been waiting for him.
Always, even in her focus, Annie kept the larger goal in mind; was always mindful of cant and slope of strata, and the thinning and thickening of beds, and what implications they held for trapping water.
She was a natural at it, so much so that Richard got the feeling she might soon be better at it than he.
The search for water often took place in the opposite conditions from those favoring the accumulation of oil
and gas—searching for synclines rather than anticlines—so that for Richard the search was often one of confusing reversal, like trying to back a trailer down the road while looking in the mirror, whereas for Annie, it was all new and natural, she had no habits to overcome, no routines to step out of.
They picnicked on the mesa in the early afternoons before returning to the school. They sat on the edge of the bluff in the high dry wind, staring out at the vastness of the desert below, and at the far-flung scattered grid of pumpjacks rising and falling as if feasting eagerly on some nectar below. They used field glasses to point out familiar landmarks—the town of Odessa looking like a postage stamp—and then, farther on, the mote of Mormon Springs.
They saw the dust rising chalk-white from the slow progression of the football team, trained the binoculars on them and saw through the wavering haze of heat the tiny ant-figures pulling the wagon out past the main street and into the desert, and watched in silence, and with a feeling almost like pity or puzzlement, as they ate the sandwiches Ruth had prepared for them, and the cobbler, and poured cups of lemonade from the thermos, and felt the sun warm on their arms and on the backs of their necks.
As if the football players far below were lost, or had tumbled into the most gigantic of pits, and were circling, searching for a way out: earnest, dedicated, but clueless, and owned, ultimately, by the affections of the town’s expectations and ironclad traditions.
The outcasts of Mormon Springs sat there and watched the prairie below, ate their pie and watched the red-tailed hawks and golden eagles sweep past below them on gusts and sheets of wind.
