May 21
Two days before the drought broke, Boyd carried the first load down to the water’s edge. In two days, Boyd’s grandfather was getting married to his longtime girlfriend, Sylvia, and Boyd would have to go to the wedding, but until then, she would camp a night or two down by the water with Isaac. She carried her pack down across the pink granite dome of rock and through the old pecan orchard and the retama and pin oak that grew along the river’s edge. She wore a pair of faded cargo pants and a linen fishing shirt, nothing bright or flashy, so she looked as if she could be from any time around here, either from now or from a hundred years ago. The flat green plastic of the sluice pan hanging from her backpack caught no light, but every now and then it bumped against a carabiner with a leaden thud. She came out onto the lake, the sandstone gravel crunching underfoot, and she liked the sound so much she took a few steps more than necessary.
First she pitched her tent, smoothing the gravel bed with the handle of her pickax. The gravel—big disks of sandstone, spheres of honeycombed limestone, clamshells both ancient and modern—would be hell to sleep on, but Isaac was bringing two air mattresses later in the truck. She threaded the poles through and staked the tent, driving the stakes deep enough to catch the ground underneath the gravel, knowing the stakes would slide out if she didn’t. She hung the electric lantern from the hook inside the tent.
Isaac would borrow Carla’s truck to drive his equipment down because he had a lot. He would bring his tent, a big four-person affair, the air mattresses and bedding, and both a grill and a camp stove, just in case he couldn’t start a fire, and an ice chest full of beer and groceries. He was bringing two camp chairs, the kind that collapsed into a single column, and a folding table, and three electric lanterns and a row of tiki torches with citronella oil. There were clothes, too, in a suitcase, and his canoe and oars, and all of his panning equipment. A battery-operated radio. Some fishing gear. A tarp to string up in the trees for shade. He was planning to stay the entire summer, pull what gold he could from the lake. She was not.
She untied the sluice pan, setting it in a corner of the tent with care. Next the books from the backpack: the Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds, a star guide, and one slim novel, Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means, lit in the late-afternoon light, filtered by the nylon, the titles already falling into shadow. She knew she cast a silhouette through the nylon; if anybody was out there, the person would see her. But she knew there was nobody. Most lakes and the rivers that fed them were empty, and they were several weeks yet from being full of the summer people. Lake Travis was less than 40 percent full, and Lake Buchanan the same, and so, in this fourth year of drought, nobody went swimming there. Those two lakes stank of catfish and mud and had rings higher than a man’s head, and those rings showed where the water should have been. The lake bottom being exposed led to a melancholy feeling, almost apocalyptic, and most people didn’t care for it.
She stepped outside, becoming part of the landscape again instead of something set apart by nylon. The moon rose in the eastern sky, and after her eyes adjusted, she saw a water moccasin, head raised about four inches, slide along the bank of the river. She couldn’t resist that briny smell of water, so she gave the snake a wide berth, waded in, and ducked her head under, feeling the way she always did when she was in a natural body of water, that here she was in the earth’s bloodstream.
In her pocket was the first gold of the summer, only this bit of gold had been stolen and not panned. Her mother’s wedding ring, tricolored gold roses in a band, bought twenty years ago in the Dakota badlands by a father who seemed to have been a different man entirely from the one Boyd had known all her life. Her father had asked for the ring so that he could give it to his new girlfriend, and Lucy Maud had said she would consider it. But Boyd had not been able to bear this, so when her mother had been at the library bickering with the other part-timers, Boyd had gone into her mother’s room and taken it from the dish at the back of the sink. The pocket where it rested was zipped so that the ring would not slide out.
Now back across the gravel field, through the shadow of the pecan orchard, the leaves whispering as she walked, and across the granite dome, a rock the size of a school bus, rising several feet into the air. Ghosts of white lichen unfolded across it, and dark rust spots stained the color of dried blood. Her footfalls, gravelly and brittle. The pencil cactus that caught at her pant legs. The smell of the river, which was really the smell of the earth, the scent when spring dirt was turned over and the dark dwellers scurried away from the sun. No sun now—a break for the sedge grass, the yucca, the white-tailed deer. The respite of night.
The light of the house ahead, the windows along the back where the house faced the lake illuminated and active, a giant moving-picture set apart from the night like a drive-in movie. Isaac was already there, moving with Boyd’s mother, setting a dish of something on the table, and Boyd realized she would be expected to stay for dinner, instead of driving the truck down to the campsite and settling in to the swish of water on pebbles.
She knocked on the back door, locked because Lucy Maud hardly ever used it, and they both looked up at her, Isaac placing forks on the left sides of plates, Boyd’s mother straining a pot of potatoes at the sink, the cloud of steam rising around her face, turning the tendrils at her temples damp and curly. Boyd came in, for that one last dinner, two days before her grandfather’s wedding, and two days before the storm.
Later, she and Isaac drove down to the lake in Carla’s truck, and she helped him pitch his tent in darkness. They inflated the air mattresses, two of them, and put one in each tent. Even if they were something, and Boyd still did not know, it would be too much for either of them to share a single tent. There had been that one time, before he had left Marble Falls, but it had been awkward, and neither had forgotten that awkwardness, how their relationship had been one thing but was not yet something new.
“You ever decide what you’re going to do next year?” he asked. He knew she wasn’t headed to UT, that was for sure, but he still wanted her to take classes at Austin Community College.
“No.” She didn’t want to talk about it, but no college was in her near future. Her parents would make her a homeschooled diploma and that would be that: she’d be done with school, perhaps forever. She did not know what she would end up being, but she knew where: for as long as it was possible, she would remain here, with her garden and her lake and the pecans and live oaks of the old riverbeds.
“If you went to ACC, you’d be in Austin.” He let the statement stand and she followed it to its conclusion on her own.
“Yeah, I’m not going to Austin.” She could not handle cities, those concentrated places of humanity, and they overwhelmed her with a certain knowledge of the world’s sadness. In a city, Boyd was far more aware of what a person would do for a place to sleep, of the way addiction severed families, of the harsh edge of struggle on buses and subways and street corners. Not only was she more aware of this situation in cities, but she was also aware of how helpless she was to stop it. In cities, too, the loss of the natural world was a heavy blow to Boyd—she needed that green as ballast, as a grounding. In the city, she was too aware of what had been cut down, what had been polluted, what was lost.
“What have you got against it?” She knew him so well, but he sometimes seemed to know nothing about her. “Boyd, I have to be there.”
“Are you asking me to come?”
“I’m asking you why you’re not.”
She thought he knew why she wasn’t, but that he wanted her to say it. “If you asked me, maybe I’d go.” It was true, too; if he asked her, if he told her that he wanted her to be there, she’d have no choice. She felt incomplete—all flounder-y—without him, as if every experience she would have in her life would only be for the story she could tell him. For it to be as if it had really happened, she felt, Isaac would have to be there.
Isaac twisted, finishing his beer and crumpling the c
an before tossing it back in the ice chest. “I’ll miss you.” He hadn’t asked her to go. She knew why, too—he couldn’t stand to be poor like his father, who was a teacher, yes, but who had been given to get-rich-quick schemes Isaac’s entire life. They’d talked about the people who stayed: How do they make money? Isaac asked. This wasn’t farming country. They were cops, managers at Walmart, and some were teachers. But it wasn’t enough for him, he who wanted to transcend, he who wanted to be better and richer, and if he ever came back, he’d live in Horseshoe Bay with a boat and a nice car and a private practice in town.
He shook himself, a move originating in his shoulders and traveling down to his fingers. “What if I pulled enough money out of this lake to pay for medical school? What if I got out of this whole thing without any debt and we could just go from there?” Isaac, who was fascinated by the insides of things; Isaac, who, yes, wanted to be a surgeon because of money, having been raised a hippie’s son in a Texas backwater, but who was truly interested in the zipping open of skin, in the baring of muscle, tendon, bone, in the silver membrane encasing organs. In another life, he would have dissected Victorian corpses to catalog the parts. But it wasn’t quite as morbid as all that, she thought. Isaac was genuinely interested in helping people. She didn’t know what a future together would look like—he wanted to leave so badly, and she wanted to stay.
“You might could,” Boyd said, imagining a medical school tuition’s worth of gold dust.
“That’s not even the real money around here.”
“Nope.”
He was talking about the stories they’d heard all their lives: the mines, the buried treasure, the prospectors thwarted and disappointed and dead. On this side of the lake alone, somewhere on or near Boyd’s family’s property, there was supposed to be an old silver mine. A hundred years ago, an unnamed man had wandered into town to spend silver ingots, saying he had a mine full of them, already pulled from the earth. He’d left town, having spent a fortune in three nights, and was never seen again. Nobody had ever found that mine, but everybody wondered if it had been the silver mine Jim Bowie had come to Texas to find, long before he died at the Alamo, sick in bed but shooting with both hands nonetheless. The real treasure, however, was the Mexican gold that Maximilian had buried somewhere in San Saba County.
“You coming to my grandfather’s wedding?” she asked eventually.
He nodded and opened another beer. “Yeah, of course. I want him to come to mine, right?” It was such an odd remark—Isaac wasn’t close to her grandfather whatsoever, had only met him once—and Boyd’s grandfather had no reason to be at Isaac’s wedding unless Isaac was marrying Boyd. It wasn’t the first time he had done this—he acted as if their getting married was an inevitability, that what was happening right now was temporary, that Boyd would change her mind and join him in Austin or wherever he was. And she knew that she probably would eventually, that she would leave this lake and these hills and go live with Isaac in an apartment in some distant place. The thought exhausted her. She said nothing, raising her hand to say good night, and she went inside her tent and zipped it up, stripping to her underwear in the light of the electric lantern. She lay on her air mattress with her flashlight, listening to the night and holding the Muriel Spark novel as if she were reading. Her neck and collarbone felt a phantom ache of bee stings, even though it was six weeks later, and she wanted to tell Ruben King how the tendrils had pulled at her wrists and shoulders. She heard the barn owls and the cricket frogs and the wind running its fingers through her trees.
Isaac, still by the fire, was thinking about how Boyd wanted him to somehow stay here, to find a way to be who they were right now for the rest of their lives. Truthfully, he saw an appeal to this: what a safe life, to be Boyd and Isaac in the Hill Country, staying the same, just growing a little older.
The problem was, he didn’t want to stay the same, or at least he didn’t want the same life he’d had growing up. He wanted a nice house—a new one, maybe custom-built—in suburbia. A clean porcelain bathtub, not the yellowed vinyl tub of his father’s. He wanted drawers in the kitchen that rolled open easily, carpet that didn’t carry the smell of last year’s rain. He wanted a house that didn’t have a coffee can of bacon grease on the back of the stovetop. Heavy stainless steel pans instead of one crusted cast-iron skillet. Multiple sets of sheets.
There would be children—one boy and one girl—and his wife would drive a minivan for at least a decade of her life, but she would complain about driving it. The boy would play soccer, the girl would study ballet. Both of them would play an instrument. His wife would be a good cook—though he would be in charge of the grill—and on Saturdays he would play golf. He’d have his own set of clubs that he would keep in the trunk of his car.
Where would Boyd’s vision fit into all of this? He did not know. He wasn’t even willing to consider staying because right now he had nothing—no money, no nothing—and this staying put, this stasis, would postpone his having something. He loved Boyd in a way he could not describe, with a sort of feral matter-of-factness, but what they each wanted from their lives seemed incompatible when meshed together. Boyd was his best friend, and he realized now that his feelings toward Boyd had something paternal and maybe a bit condescending: he wanted to protect her. He remembered that day he’d seen her give that man medicine at H-E-B, and he’d never seen anything else like that—a person who was attuned to and who anticipated the needs of other people, and who worked hard to meet these needs. Boyd was endlessly, infinitely giving, and it exhausted her. It exhausted him. He wanted to help people, too, but he knew how to draw a line for himself. He’d never been in a situation in which he’d been unable to turn off his emotions—he’d been confronted with heartbreak, but he’d done everything he could and, in so doing, satisfied his conscience.
He remembered, too, the one time they’d slept together, one night last summer, when they’d been camping at the lake, and he’d heard her crying in her tent. He’d had a girlfriend at the time—Mae, a fellow premed student, with whom he volunteered at Seton Hospital. But he had gone into the tent to comfort Boyd, and she had clung to him in such a way, and when it was over, neither of them could believe it, but she still wouldn’t let go. Much later, it occurred to him that it was likely Boyd’s first time, but in that moment when he held her in the middle of the night on her air mattress, he’d realized that no matter what he felt, he was too careless for her, too unready for a relationship that would fundamentally close off parts of his life.
He felt a need to disentangle himself from Boyd, the opposite of ripping off a Band-Aid, a nearly imperceptible drawing back that would nevertheless result in separation, though he didn’t want her to realize that it was happening. At the same time, this thought was unbearable: there would never be another Boyd. He pictured them in their different lives, both married to other people. When he pictured this, he saw Boyd and himself across a room, exchanging glances. He thought that their spouses would just have to understand, that his wife would have to be okay with Boyd always coming first because she always had. But no. No wife would put up with this. And how could he bear the thought of Boyd’s husband?
He thought, too, of the girls he’d dated this year in Austin, mostly sorority girls, though this didn’t mean empty-headed and shallow, dressed in cardigans and UGGs. Taylor, hair the color of roasted almonds, studying finance. She knew so much about food, and Isaac had lapped this up; she’d taught him cava and manchego and gnocchi and prix fixe, and the differences in glassware. Brooke, a gymnast, whose muscled body had been painfully hard against his, had helped him figure out how to dress himself, had even taught him how to tie a tie. The one not-sorority girl, Carrie, waited tables at the Crown and Anchor and was unbeatable at foosball. All of these possibilities, plus a million more, and not one of them was Boyd. But Boyd was Boyd, wanting out of life what she wanted, and he would not impose upon this Boyd-ness because in twenty years she would hate him for the imposition. Nor could he resi
gn himself to a life of sameness in the Hill Country: the same grass, the same people, the same Dollar General and H-E-B and Whataburger and Walmart. He loved it here—he truly did—but he wanted to see what else there was in the world.
Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here
There’s More Gold in the Ground in San Saba County
Than There Is in Circulation in the World
Another thing the old-timers will tell you. Stories? Maybe, but good ones. And there’s evidence, too. It’s not just as if they made it up out of whole cloth. The San Saba News reported on that capitalist out of Mexico, the miner Edward Fitzgerald, who in 1887 showed up to Hoover’s Valley, went straight to Mr. Rufe Hoover, and offered him ten thousand dollars, take it or leave it, for a specific 640 acres, with what he suspected was two miles of inexhaustible fissure veins of rich gold and silver both. Then, in 1899, a Dr. Kelso dug in the yard of John Haas of Bowser Country in search of the six million dollars of gold that Maximilian buried in the Hill Country when he invaded Mexico in the nineteenth century. Dr. Kelso found a map in Mexico, dug up poor Mr. Haas’s yard, and found a boat, a coffin, a tray, and three hearts built of masonry. This is what the San Saba paper said: “three hearts built of masonry.” In 1901, Kelso disappeared, leaving only a hole. From the San Saba News, July 19, 1901: “And this hole is no little thing either; it is 130 feet long, 70 feet wide and on an average about 12 feet deep.”
Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here Page 3