by Rick Bass
He stood motionless, his shadow giant upon the mesa beyond. Moths swarmed his lantern, fell wing-singed into the clutter of weeds. The coyotes in the sand hills beyond saw his light and began laughing, shrieking, coming closer, and he turned the light out and listened.
Later in the night, on toward morning, sleeping in her bed, he would be awakened by the sound of the football team, the collective hope and fury of them cantering down the road, their wagon-cart rattling behind them; and in those first few moments, lying on his back looking up at the ceiling, and with all the furniture as it had always been, and the curtains half-open, and the window raised, and the morning birds beginning to stir and call, it would seem to him—for half a second, a full second, and sometimes even three or four delicious seconds—that she was still with him, that he had been successful in capturing her, and in capturing his own happiness: that he had not failed.
Most evenings, however, he hung out with Herbert Mix, going over to his house and visiting with him in his backyard amidst the cool shade and sweet odor of the willows. They drank iced tea, and only occasionally visited about lore and sagas of the past-stagecoach treasures. Instead, Herbert Mix talked about future plans, about upcoming projects, and about his new clan: and in particular, about Marie, and Annie, and Ruth. He had volunteered to be the school handyman, which afforded him still more opportunity to be over in Mormon Springs, and he soon had the school and its grounds looking first-rate, pastoral and idyllic, even as the elementary and middle and high schools in Odessa languished.
“She likes me,” he said, “but she says she’s lived alone too long to ever get used to having a man around full-time. She says a little goes a long way,” he said. “She says she’d rather not see me enough than too much. She says it’s not my fault, but that sometimes all the attention makes her feel like she’s being buried. She says that some nights she has dreams of being dug up, and that’s a good thing, but other nights she has dreams of being buried alive.”
Herbert Mix looked down at his hands, and Richard knew that in those dreams, it must have been Herbert Mix doing the burying, on at least some occasions: and he did not know what to say, did not know what counsel to give the old man.
“You’re happy, right?” he asked. “I mean, look at you, you’ve changed. You’re a new man. You’re not . . .” He paused, looking for a word other than “greedy.”
“Greedy?” Herbert Mix said. “No, I’m not. Yeah, I’m happy. It just seems like I could be happier. Like I’m so close. And like time’s running out. Which it is.” He looked at his old shovel-digging hands again. “It’s like being hungry,” he said. “You always know, or are almost certain, that you’re going to eat again. You just don’t know when.”
Richard nodded. He knew that he should try to dissuade the old man from looking at it that way, but he couldn’t, and still call himself a friend. “You’re right,” he said. “That’s what it’s like.”
And slowly, and generously, Herbert Mix brought him further into the fold, inviting him along whenever he traveled out to Mormon Springs, riding out there in his truck and then staying over at Marie’s, while Richard drove his truck back to town, returning for him later the next day. And on such occasions, Herbert Mix knew pure bliss, nestling into the old wrinkle-sacked gray-haired skin-and-bones nest of her at night, his own ancient body thrilled by the feel of the crisp cotton sheets, and by the evening wind that stirred through the house; and it felt to all of them in the household that it was as if Herbert Mix was a grandfather, and Marie, a grandmother: and the three of them, Annie and Marie and Herbert Mix, accepted this new braiding, this new identity.
It seemed sustainable and natural and durable, and the whole of them accepted, day by day and increment by increment, the arrival of Richard, in a way that not even the Republican oilmen down in Mexico had accepted him, nor even, so long ago now—suddenly, it seemed long ago—the way that Clarissa had taken him into her life.
He began to feel embedded, cemented, like the fossils they discovered in their diggings; and many nights he found himself dreaming Marie’s dream, in which he too was being buried: and it was the entire population of Mormon Springs that was wielding the shovels, incorporating him into their combination, their community, and yet there was no darkness, even as the dirt rained down over him, there was still light, he could still see all that he had been able to see before.
As Herbert Mix knew bliss on the nights when he spent the night in Mormon Springs, Marie, at least, knew comfort, sleeping or sometimes merely resting in the bony cage of his arms and his one leg, his knees and elbows. She knew pleasure if not rapture, contentment if not ecstasy. And she did not quite know what to make of it, sometimes straddling that middle country between receiving the attention of another, after having previously been ignored all of her life, and yet finally possessing also true freedom, after having been for so long a captive or hostage, to one thing or another.
She would lie looking up at the ceiling, aware of her sleeping household—the old man asleep, and pleasantly proximate, but making no claim on her, and the young girl, well on her way to becoming a strong young woman—and Marie would know contentment. Never would she have imagined that her life of deprivation might ever have been moving her all along toward a place where such deprivation no longer existed, yet here it was, real, the child was in her house, and the man too.
And yet, in those same moments of night-wakefulness, she was aware that a hunger still persisted. Almost as if, now that these first pleasures were being met, they were as but the seeds or scratchings for some other awakening, some long-ago hunger she had forgotten or never known.
In Mexico, the water had been poisoned by the residue of toxic chemicals used by miners in the mountains, cyanide and arsenic, which stripped away the overburden of ore and sediment, revealing faint traces, here and there, of gold, copper, and silver—and as such, the geologists drank mostly beer, and had had their drinking water flown in from distant sources—Idaho, Montana, Oregon—though Sy Craven had said that there were mines up there that would curl their hair, entire mountainsides stripped away, leaving oozing pustules of suppurating earth, and with so much lead leaching into the creeks that all the fish died or grew mutations, and the men, women, and children downstream grew enormous tumors, became feeble, brain-stunted, and anemic. Whenever a shipment of water arrived, Sy Craven would wipe the dust from the top of the heavy glass milk bottles in which it had been shipped, would open the seal and sniff the water as if it were the most expensive wine, and then he would sip from it, and after a moment would pronounce it either fit or unfit.
He claimed to be able to tell by that method alone the purity or impurity of waters, though his concerns were not health-based—all of the geologists, intimate as they were with the brutalities of time, the roughness of the scale against which their flashes of life were measured, understood too well their lives were but chaff blown by the wind. Rather, he simply loved the taste of good water, and abhorred the taste of bad.
But the water in Odessa tasted even worse than the water in Mexico, which had been merely rank with metal. The Odessa water was sulfurous, with the taste growing worse in the summer months as the level of water wells dropped. Some in town had likened it to what water would taste like were it to be filtered through the carcass of a rotting cow, claiming that a single glass of it left out overnight would by the next day have filled the entire room with the odor of its putrescence—and in Odessa, too, people had resorted to trucking in water from relatives elsewhere, or treating it with chlorine or halazone or iodine tablets, or boiling it.
The water at Mormon Springs had always been better—fresher, and cooler—though it possessed a higher iron content, which the townspeople of Odessa had scorned for the way it discolored their laundry, their dishes, and, they claimed, even their teeth. But to the residents of Mormon Springs, it was what they knew, it tasted sweet and delicious, and it did not bother them that the town, the big city, reviled their water as it reviled nearl
y everything else about them.
In the year that Richard arrived, however, some of the children had begun to comment that the water did not taste as good as before. It was hard to describe—but it tasted warmer, they said, so much so that they began chilling bottles of water in the refrigerator each night, to use in the coming day, chasing and trying to return to the taste of that sweeter water, the specifics of which were already becoming harder for them to remember.
And although Richard had nothing to compare it to—the water he had drunk out at Clarissa’s had been from a different reservoir, more alkaloid than the water at Mormon Springs—he believed them when they said there was more sediment in the water than before, and tiny motes of particles, and air bubbles that had never been there before. They said the water even sounded different as it came out of the faucet.
On through the autumn, the problem became worse—late in the afternoon and evenings, the pipes shuddered and heaved and clanked, as if laboring to produce the water.
Occasionally the faucets would spit out gasping chunks of air, as if the water had become animated or enspirited and was struggling for breath, and it was unsettling to the residents of Mormon Springs, who had always prided their water as being better and more dependable, than the town’s; and it was troubling to Richard, too, as he and Annie continued to work on their map, searching for more sources. He had the feeling that what had begun in leisure was now accelerating to need, and he felt, far in advance of the residents of Mormon Springs, the accruing weight of an unasked-for and undesired responsibility.
All he wanted was his old life back. He was not asking for riches, nor promise of better days from the future; no bounty, no golden horn of plenty. He had been happy, and he just wanted to go back. He did not want to reengineer the entire subterranean plumbing of a remote desert community. He did not want to be responsible, in his failure or success—and in the luck of the draw, in the outcome of the story that was already set in stone below—for men, women, and children having to abandon their homes and move, meekly, beaten back into the very town that had already cast them out.
And yet: they had begun it; and just as the residents of Mormon Springs claimed to be able to notice almost daily now a deterioration in the quality of their water and well pressures, it seemed to Richard that he could discern also daily the growing pride and intelligence of Annie as she became more confident, and took greater possession of the map.
It occurred to him that she was mothering the map, almost parenting it: treating it the way she might have wished to have been treated by her true parents.
He tried to shake the thought from his mind—it was no business of his, and certainly not his place to judge people he had never met or known—who knew what the circumstances were that had led to her being orphaned? It could have been any of a thousand reasons, or ten thousand, all beyond her parents’ control—and yet it returned, larger each time, as if having grown from his efforts to shove it aside.
Surely she had to think about such things.
They worked on the map at school, and after school. They continued to make field trips, often Richard and Annie alone, borrowing Herbert Mix’s jeep and traveling as far into the desert as Richard dared, carrying extra water: out past Castle Gap and Horsehead Crossing, out into the country around Juan Cordona Lake, crossing back over old territory. They climbed up into the mesas, not just to continue the search for fossils, but to observe from that greater vantage the network of landforms below, not just the muddy artery of the Pecos itself, but all the dried-out and gone-away traces of past tributaries, draws, and arroyos, and the secret confederacy of streams that had once flowed there; and the rise and fall of mesa and butte, the vertical escarpments of stone whispering the secret location of faults, and all other manner of secrets of the earth.
Ruth was beginning to let go of her jealousy—reminding herself to choose always what was best for the children, to choose always what was best for Annie—and she had commented to Richard how unusual it was for Annie to take to a stranger.
“I think it’s a real growth step for her,” she said. “I worry that I’m just filling her with knowledge, but that she’s not learning how to be with other people—nonfamily members. I think you’re bringing her a balance she’s been hungry for.”
“I do too,” Richard said.
Time and again, particularly in the quiet moments between them, up on the mesa, Annie would seem to perceive or divine what he was thinking. Once, when he was thinking about the untapped, unmined water they were pursuing, Annie asked him straight out, “You’re rich, aren’t you? Rich enough to go out and take those leases, and to drill some of those wells?” And he had to answer her truthfully, telling her that although he didn’t think of it as being rich—it was just money, was all, the leftover residue of his work, and his old life—that yes, he would be able to take the leases for them, and drill the wells, once they had all the water hunted down and trapped; and she seemed satisfied with that answer, uninterested in any further particulars as to how rich.
Another time, when he was thinking of Clarissa, she asked him, out of the blue, “Have you ever been married, have you ever been in love?”—and still another time, when he was pondering Ruth and her aloofness, and yet her quiet allure—not passion or even hunger, but an allure—when he went into the schoolroom, or any room, his eyes went first to her—Annie asked, “Do you like Ruth?”
And when he acknowledged that yes, he respected and admired as well as liked her, Annie nodded and said, “She’s hard to like. It took me a long time to see beneath her.”
There weren’t a lot of peers—Ruth would have liked to have three or four more older students, for what she would have considered the perfect mix—but from the standpoint of family, the school could be considered large, not just with many siblings, but numerous aunts, uncles, cousins.
The closest thing Annie had to a best friend was Maeve, who was three years younger than she, and whom she’d befriended as much out of a mix of obligation and need as true friendship. The upside for Annie was that she got to know better a girl she might have known only barely, otherwise; the downside was that many days, she felt her differences attenuated even further—her intellectual life stretching out toward that of Ruth’s and Richard’s even as her emotional life regressed, at times, to that of a girl who still played with dolls.
The best she could make of it some days was that Maeve was a kind of living doll: though on the days when she did not want to play with dolls, there were frustrations for both girls. The situation was better for Maeve, who could not help but drift along at a little quicker pace, academically; though there were days when Maeve too was aggravated by the stretch.
In all, it was a ragtag and sometimes disjointed procession over which Ruth kept constant vigil, and worried about, encouraging each child academically, but keeping careful watch also over their social development, and general happiness. Annie foremost, of course—parentless, and the pet—but all the children. Ruth watched them almost all day, and then in her dreams at night.
She would have denied fiercely the assertion that she watched them too much; that she was obsessed, partly as a means of holding at bay the rest of the world, and her fright at the emotional demands of adults. She would have countered that the children were both purer and more deserving, and that their demands and needs were at least as complex as those of any adult.
As one of the ways to help plug some of the fractures and disconnections that occurred in the children’s classroom lives, Ruth had enlisted them in an educator’s pen-pal foreign-exchange network for the broader good of instilling in them the sense that they mattered to the world, beyond the confines of home. And it was touching to her to see the joy with which they received the simplest of letters, opening them like talismans and then reading and rereading them at various points throughout the day.
In each reading, the children would gaze at their letters as if attempting to see not just between the lines, but behind them, focusi
ng on a different sentence in each reading. It did not matter that the sentences were almost overwhelmingly simple; the world behind the sentences was rich and immense. They saw the gerbils, saw the interior of another child’s house, imagined the consternation of one parent and the amusement of another. They saw the lawn out front, saw the clothes, heard the birds in the hedges outside a child’s window fluttering in the night. There was treasure hidden between every word.
And some days, when it was all going well—when the children’s lesson plans were falling by the wayside, when they were blowing past the old plans—growing deeper as well as broader—some days, Ruth felt the glide going, in her classroom and even in her life. Some days, it all felt right.
By Halloween, Annie and Richard had the water shaped and identified, though still not yet fully trapped. The rough shapes of the aquifers were beginning to take form, lenses of water in the Rorschach outlines of jaguars, parrots, serpents, and dragons. Some of the aquifers were like vaulted cathedrals, while others were like low basements, tunnels, and caverns. Annie and Richard had color-coded those aquifers they knew had been contaminated by oil and gas drilling, and those which they were pretty certain had not. They also identified the major sand bodies that provided the drinking water to the families in Mormon Springs.
The only thing they had not yet completed were the final contours between aquifers. They had sketched dashed lines where they thought the reservoirs were bounded; but they could not yet be absolutely sure if their aquifers were isolated, or thinly connected. If the latter, then there might exist sinuous little tendrils of escape routes, through which their water could be drained by the efforts of another, or through which toxins could intrude.
