by Rick Bass
For those final contours, Richard was going to have to purchase and process seismic data and perform geophysical interpretations, as well as chemical analysis of whatever water samples he could obtain. The relatively easy work had been done, and some of what remained might now lie beyond Annie’s range: but he kept coming over almost daily, keeping up that near-daily progression, until it began more than ever to seem to both of them like some alternative world; and in some instances, there would be no way of knowing those final contours until they actually drilled a well.
In some instances, the imagination, as well as all their powers of scientific reasoning, would fail, and they would have to physically grasp the subject itself, drilling into it and exhuming it and examining it with their own two hands: and they were anxious for this process to begin, though Richard had to caution her, telling her of the countless operators he’d seen go out of business by rushing their drilling, working more on emotion than on science.
“Do more field work, and more map work,” he advised. “You can never do too much. Do it until you’re sick of it, until you can’t stand to look at the map another day—until you think you know it so well that you could draw it all over again, blindfolded—and then keep studying it, and suddenly things will shift, you’ll see something a different way.
“That’s when you’re about ready to drill,” he said. “That’s when the map comes alive. It starts to move.
“It changes you,” he said. “It’s worn you down, at that point. The map’s not changing—you’re just rotating to look at it a different way. And you see different angles, different perspectives, and you can incorporate them into the map. And then you’re ready to drill.”
“It’s pretty exciting,” Annie said. “I think I could do this all my life. And I know our map’s right. I believe what you’re saying, and I’ll look forward to seeing it. But I know the map’s right. Sometimes it already does that for me—comes alive. I was scared the first time I saw it do that. I thought it was going to leave—that all of a sudden, it couldn’t make sense any longer. But it just moved a little ways, and then it stopped. I’ve already seen it move,” she said.
He didn’t know what to say. And didn’t know what to think about the upwelling of pride in him.
Beginning in his lower jaw again, and spreading through his teeth. Glowing in his chest again, as if afire, and then spreading warmly out through his shoulders and arms again.
“Well,” was all he could think of to say, “I think you’d be good at it.”
Like old bachelors, some evenings he and Herbert Mix did not go to visit the ladies, but instead grilled steaks out in Herbert Mix’s backyard and drank vodka and tonics with ice cubes rattling in tall glasses, one lime wedge and then two and then three decorating the bottoms of their glasses, and their plates empty save for the watery residue of the juices that seeped out from the knife’s cutting.
Sometimes they talked about the old days—Herbert Mix about the Butterfield Stage and the Sublette gang, while occasionally Richard regaled him with tales of Mexico—but mostly they talked about the present or the future: not just about Marie and Ruth, but also Annie, whom Herbert Mix was beginning to regard as a granddaughter.
Richard wondered aloud if most young girls were like her—if she was a miracle of her age—and decided that most were probably not like her, that she was one in a million, one in a billion.
They visited about the water, too. It was running out fast now, but so what? They would find more. There would always be a second chance.
Herbert Mix was glad that Richard had come back. He might never have thought of Richard again, had the younger man not reappeared. He would certainly never have thought of Richard as someone who could heal damage—much less the damage that Richard himself had helped wreak. He might not have even imagined that the problem was solvable. He and the others might have accepted the diminishment of water quality as a fact of life. They might have limped along for a few more years, remembering the good old days, but tolerating now the taste of sulfur and clanking pipes that were as likely to spit out wads of sand as cool clean water; and then, when the pipes exhaled nothing but a dry warm hiss, they might have gathered their belongings and moved on, seed-drift, disconnected.
Richard was the last person Herbert Mix would have thought could help hold things together. Ruth, maybe, or even a child like Annie, once she had grown to adulthood. But he would not have guessed Richard to be such a person. In the old days when Richard had been running around with Clarissa, Herbert Mix had thought of him as nothing more than a well-off young person, indulging himself in the pleasures of a beautiful woman.
He had not blamed him for it—remembering it, Clarissa’s beauty filtered back to Herbert Mix like smoke, so startling all these years later. When he had thought about it at all, he had classified Richard as a taker, like himself. He had not seen him as a giver.
He wanted to ask Richard what had changed him, but didn’t know how to address it. It would be like acknowledging that he’d once thought Richard to be something of an asshole. Certainly, people were free to change without the impetus of some single dramatic event. Sharp edges got worn down by the harsh glances of time deflecting off a life, day after day, and the current in which a traveler moved rarely stopped carrying the traveler along.
Herbert Mix knew that he himself had changed, had finally had his own awful emptiness filled—as if some wound in him had finally been healed. He rarely knew hunger of any kind, now, other than to be in Marie’s company.
But listening to Richard talk about his pursuit of the water, and watching Richard and Annie work on the map, and seeing them journey back into the desert, was causing old stirrings to resuscitate. Herbert Mix thought this might be how it was for an alcoholic or other addict, who, after long abstinence, feels glowing within the return of the first single filament of ignition, the strand of destiny or chemical attachment reawakening.
As if, upon entering such a place—such a cave or abyss—the only source of light to be seen was that single glowing filament that went far beyond desire, and even beyond need. It was something even purer than that, it was an object of worship, it was the essence of all existence. Suddenly, to such a person, and in such a situation, there was no more darkness.
Richard chose to be crafty. Their goal was too great to entrust to strangers. As the map grew ever closer to life, security became paramount. They chose not to trust another land manager to go out and take the leases for them, but decided instead upon a strategy in which Richard would target first the lands that were most undeniably dead to oil and gas, attempting to give the appearance to his old associates that he had some long-shot belief that he could find oil where they had not.
The name of the searcher’s desire, “water,” would not be mentioned. Richard would allow his old associates to believe that he was still pursuing the same grail he had pursued before. He would allow them to think that he had lost his talent; that he was crashing and burning, foundering, as so many did. That he was pouring money down a rat hole, that he was on the road to ruin.
He would allow them to think that they would help show him the way to that ruination, by selling him their old subsurface deeds and mineral interests.
He approached them with just the right mix of confidence and uncertainty. He was down on his luck, looking for something cheap, he was a little arrogant, hoping for one big play.
They sold him their old leases, the dead and dry and abandoned, their cluttered failures from the past, for a nickel on the dollar, and did so gladly, as if he were but an amateur, a hobbyist; and now the children at Mormon Springs school had a new map to color and hang on their wall, the map of their leases, with even the youngest ones pitching in.
It seemed to be coming to life—they seemed to be bringing it to life—even as they understood that the map was already alive, and had existed as if waiting for them long before any of them had been born.
The gateway of the flesh, as ancient and timeles
s as mountains of stone, as fleeting as a day, or a single season: the shock of hunger he felt when he saw Ruth in shorts for the first time, on a weekend, the three of them working on the map down at the school. It made no sense, he was waiting on Clarissa, but suddenly there were Ruth’s legs, brown and strong, and something else he could not name at first.
She had noted his attention with pleasure, and with some pride and surprise. She thought about teasing him, about asking him how long it had been, or if he had a girlfriend, but refrained, not wanting to make light of or discourage his notice. And knowing that he might ask the same questions of her.
Instead, they mapped. It was like a covenant, a trust increasing slowly each day. It was not a leap into the abyss, not a plummeting nor a freefall. It was a steady, cautious edging forward, it was prudent and cautious, sustainable, it was informed by observation and sometimes even restraint.
I’m not in love, not at all, Richard thought. I can back out at any time. And Ruth felt much the same way.
She invited him over for dinner one night, along with Herbert Mix and Marie and Annie, not to work on or even talk about the map, or even school for that matter, but simply to make dinner. They rolled their own pasta and sliced it thin with razor-sharp knives, oiled it and dried it on a rack while they diced the last of the season’s tomatoes from Marie and Annie’s garden and put them in a bowl with chopped mincings of garlic, their fingers sticky and fragrant from the dicing. They chopped basil, Parmesan, black olives, and poured in olive oil, and a sprinkling of red pepper flakes and oregano. Annie sneezed as the five of them worked.
A loaf of bread was baking in the oven, an old Mormon recipe, Ruth said, and the fragrance was overwhelming. Coarse salt and pepper were added to the spaghetti when it was all done and being served, and they ate out on the porch and watched the dusk come in, with the warlike trooping of the football team visible, briefly, on the horizon.
The bread steaming, the butter sliding into and then through the bread. More salt: they all craved salt, Annie and Marie particularly. Herbert Mix’s old treasure-digging hand resting in Marie’s, and Marie, that evening, welcoming it.
She is not coming back, Richard thought, when he thought about Clarissa at all. Other times it seemed that she was already present: and still other times, it seemed that his life was better than he could have imagined, and fuller than he remembered it being when she had been present.
The next week, scarcely believing her own daring—the magnitude of her trust, and the recklessness, like letting an infidel or barbarian in through the gates of the kingdom—Ruth invited him over for dinner by himself.
They ate inside, not by candlelight, but by the light of a single low lamp. The evening was cooler, it was mid-November. She told him about her childhood and her young adulthood, and about her sojourn in the Church, as she still called it, borderline apostate though she was becoming. A flank steak, baked potatoes, a salad, and a cheesecake made with four different types of cheeses, and her own bottle of wine, and then the bottle he had brought.
They went out onto the porch where they could hear, faintly, the occasional echo of the fans banging the pipes against their helmets, and sporadic cannon-roar. The glow of distant stadium lights so far away that when, later into the night, it finally faded, there was not even a sadness.
It was his turn to talk more about himself, and he did, telling her about Mexico, and about geology—about how comfortable he felt down in the muck of the past, and even some about his old days, his former dealings with Herbert Mix. He told her almost everything, and when she asked about Clarissa, saying that she remembered having heard from someone, maybe Herbert Mix, that he’d had quite an attractive girlfriend for a while, Richard nodded and said, “Oh, her. Yes, she was really beautiful, she was something else.”
They were both quiet for a while, and then the conversation moved on, as if they had both buried her—as if it had been that simple, and that unsustainable, too; as if she was able, finally, to be put down and away in a single sentence—and in the desert coolness, and beneath the same bright stars of autumn that he had known as a younger man, it felt to Richard as if a thorn had been pulled from him, and that a thing that had long been in him was free at last to begin flowing out.
It was after midnight. He started to tell her about how he used to swim the rapids at Horsehead Crossing. He tried to remember the man who had done such things, but dismissed this thought, having no real interest in that; and instead, they talked on further, moving ahead, talking until nearly 2:00 a.m., before the rigors of the week caught up with Ruth, and she could stay awake no longer.
It seemed to her that it would be easier for him to stay, easier for them both to undress, and for her to take shelter in the refuge of his body, to crawl into the cage of his arms and legs, and to love, and then sleep, on through the last of the night’s darkness and into the bright light of Saturday morning.
She nearly suggested it. And if he had suggested it, she believed she would have.
Instead, they pulled back. The wine bottles were empty, as were their dessert plates on the ground next to them. They did not preclude love in the future. They did not avoid or evade it, stepping laterally away from it, nor did they turn away from it and move in the other direction.
They simply paused, that evening, and looked out at the night sky and considered where they were and what they were looking at, beholding it as they might a single distant strand of light.
Slowly, the cheapest leases assembled themselves on the map. It was tempting to make a run on all that he could reach, but Richard did not want to panic any of the other geologists; he worried that one of them, in looking at the whole of his assemblage, might piece the rather simple picture together.
Occasionally, he even pursued and bid upon leases that—to him—almost surely held oil and gas, just to keep the foolish preconceptions of the unobservant continuing their sleepy-lidded gazes in the same direction.
Even at nickels and dimes on the dollar, the costs were adding up. He and the school had hoped to be able to find a hundred years’ worth of water, though that had been in a perfect world; as the leases were assembled, with certain tracts unavailable or unaffordable, it was looking like they might eventually end up with only about sixty or seventy years’ worth.
Still, it was better than the day-to-day uncertainty of wondering if each time a sink faucet or showerhead was turned on, it would be the last, and that one day no water at all would issue forth, not even the sulfurous bile-water that was turning up, but instead only a thin stream of grit and sand, sand pouring from the faucet as if it were some form of wealth and they had suddenly become rich in it, the endless glittering silica of mountains worn down to nothing, hundreds of thousands of years in the wearing-down.
Beautiful sand, hot and dry, sand the color of pearls and ecru filling their sinks, and spilling onto their floors, and rising to the windows; flowing out through the windows then, and rising to the roofs: filling their homes, running them out of their homes—destroying and yet preserving them, embedding them in sand, encasing them in the disassembled detritus of those long-ago mountains, mountains on which blue ice had been capped, with cool green forests of fir and spruce, and through which giant tigers and long-legged camels and sloths and mastodons had once passed.
The sand flowing into the streets, rivers of sand eventually erasing all signs and evidence of commerce and habituation, and scaling over all the old ruinous pockmarked slumps that were the remnants of the geologists’ activity, and of the civilization’s hungers for the black oil and the flames and flares of the sweet and bitter gas.
Should I have stayed in Mexico for the extra year and a half? Richard wondered. Like some thin and final distance, would it have not, in the end, been a simple matter to travel those last five hundred days, with wealth—so much wealth—awaiting him at the end?
Had he remained to travel that last and lesser distance, he would have been in a position to take ten times as many leases, and
could have procured all of the water. He could have built, or at least saved, a kingdom.
But I would have missed her, he thought. The water might not have lasted a year.
They might have been able to truck some in from somewhere, for a while. But they might also have folded, dispersed, disassembled. Things would have been different.
I had to go, he told himself. I had to leave that very day. Not another hour, not another minute.
Why do I feel full? he wondered one day, sitting up in his loft, reading and looking out over the town of Odessa: watching, as if from habit alone, the horizon. Why do I feel content when my need, my goal, is not being met?
Still, the other came to him, again and occasionally in dreams. Still, he imagined seeing that rise of smoke, plume of distant dust.
Thanksgiving was held at Marie and Annie’s. They watched the professional football game on television, the Green Bay Packers playing the Dallas Cowboys, the latter the beloved icon of much of the rest of the state, and whom Ruth could not resist referring to as “the Cowpies,” pretending to not be able to remember the correct name. They cooked a small turkey in a fire pit dug in the backyard, a tiny cavern covered with grasses and limbs and leaves—they had been reading about such native methods in social studies—and rubbed the bird with paprika and black pepper and cumin seeds and brown sugar. They baked sweet potatoes in the pit and roasted sweet corn, and made pumpkin pies and pumpkin-chocolate cheesecakes. They baked sweet-potato biscuits, rumored to have been Thomas Jefferson’s favorite, and talked about Jefferson, read some of his writings out loud, while the game, attended to now only by Herbert Mix, played in the other room.
They drank apple cider and spiced tea, the taste of cloves as dense and rich as wood, and they cooked some more, then spent hours cleaning dishes, hoping that the water would hold out for one more day, which it did.
