All the Land to Hold Us

by Rick Bass

  The boosters would run a short distance farther with the boys, grinning wildly, as if in amongst a herd of wild cattle or mustangs. But then the wagon, the football players as well as the loose herd, the coaches and the band, would be pulling away, and after that short distance each booster, man and woman, would have to slow to a stop, gasping, bent over and huffing, hands on his or her knees; and as they watched the wagon growing smaller and smaller, not like some tide receding or being pulled by the boys but as if drawn away by some larger, hungrier force, with the boosters’ donations piled high on the sides of the wagon, those left behind could sense further that their lives were draining away: and as if some wild little spark burned stubborn within them even still, they would begin already, in that moment of loneliness and failure, to consider what gifts and offerings they might be able to bestow for the next morning’s run, and the next; and for most of them, no matter what deals they closed later that day, or what transactions occurred, that brief morning’s chase would be the highlight of their day.

  For those of them who were too old or infirm to run briefly alongside the wagon—for those who might totter out in front of it and be crushed—they would place their contributions on the sidewalks, and the street corners, on the night before; or, worried that coyotes and stray dogs would wander into town and carry away the perishable items, they would wait until that first gray light of dawn to hurry out with their streetside emplacements for the boys to take as they galloped past; and it was a thrill for the old people to sit by their windows and watch as their offerings were received—the velocity and hunger with which the gifts were scooped up seeming somehow crudely representative of gratitude.

  And it was a thrill, or at least a pleasure, for the boys, too, in the monotony of their run, to know that they could always keep looking forward to the next block, and the next; and as with their memories of those rare moments in which a nearly silent glide was achieved, so too in later years would they remember how it had been for each of them when they had first caught sight of the morning’s distant, shining gift, glinting in the new-rising light, and of how they had surged slightly, unconsciously, thundering toward both their reward and their goal.

  It made them stronger. They left nothing behind.

  The games were murderous. The fans wore shining hardhats (the team was called the Roughnecks), and banged on their own helmeted heads with pipe wrenches after every score, or any particularly dramatic play. It was a deafening, maddening sound, not only to the fans inflicting this upon themselves, but to the players and referees, more disturbing than even the primal wailing of bagpipes, and deeply unsettling to the opposing team.

  Cannons boomed blue smoke into the thin dry air every time there was an Odessa score, and trumpets blared so that the night’s sounds were nothing less than those of war; and adrenaline, musky as dog piss, flowed uselessly through the veins of everyone in the stadium, and exited their pores and rose from the circular confines of the new stadium like mist or fog rising from a swamp as the morning light first strikes it on a summer day. The mist intermingled with particles of cannon smoke, and the raft of it was illuminated to a shifting, pulsing glow beneath the halogen intensity of the overhead stadium lights.

  Out in the desert, on their nighttime geological digs, or their riverside camping trips, Richard and Clarissa could hear the distant cannons, and the crazed and arrhythmic pipe-and-helmet clattering; and hunkered there on the high reef, they would be able to see clearly the round bowl of incandescence from which those distant sounds were emanating—howls that again elicited in return, from all across the prairie, the savage yelps and wailing of the packs of coyotes, squalls and barks rising all around them from out of the darkness. It would seem to Clarissa and Richard in those moments that the two of them out there on the old frozen reef were the only ones not speaking the language of that excitement, and it was a lonely feeling for them to feel so voiceless, so disempowered.

  In that loneliness, Clarissa might have let her heart move in closer to Richard’s, there in the safety and distance of the darkness. She had not traveled this far into life, however, hoarding across the span of her days that one rare and delicate treasure, only to release it over the course of a single lonely or frightened evening, or even a hundred or a thousand such evenings.

  It could seem to her sometimes though, in Richard’s company—whether lonely or not, and whether in the distant-desert darkness or the full white light of day—that that tightly held cone-shaped muscle, the frozen stone-treasure of her ungiving heart, no longer rested on as secure a ledge as it once had, safe from the reach of the world, but was emplaced now on some slight slope; and that the substrate on which that stone heart rested was no longer as firm, but disintegrating, with siftings of sand grains fine as sugar being whisked from beneath it by the steady force of wind and water—forces she had once long ago, as a child, perhaps, viewed as dispassionate, but which she now perceived were hungry solely for her: hungry for the fairness of her skin, the tone of her muscles, the luster of her dark hair, the corona of her beauty.

  There were the world’s sounds, then, swirling and howling and shouting at one another, with Clarissa and Richard caught voiceless amidst that wild conversation; and there was the steady rushing of the night breezes above them, winding above them like the braids of rivers they could hear but never see; and visible before them was the mushroom-globe dome of blue-white light.

  Scattered beyond the stadium and its dying, fading lights, after the game had ended, were the little lights of the town; and beyond that, the lonely vertical towers of incandescent white light that illuminated the outline of each solitary drilling rig, the men and their machines hunting always the elusive green-black swamps and seas of buried oil, hunting the last of it; and beyond the town, in all directions, the wavering yellow lights of the gas flares of the oil wells.

  The effect of seeing all those orange fires out on the prairie below was that they might have been viewing a sprawling encampment of Kiowa or Comanche from a century before; or that they had come to the edge of some bluff from which vantage they could see a sight unintended for them—the plains of hell, or at least the gathering encampments of those waiting to be judged and sentenced.

  But up on the reef, away from it all, Clarissa and Richard were safely beyond that queue, and knew it; and like lost or clumsy but diligent miners, they kept searching on their hands and knees, with claw hammer and pry pick, the corrugated stony earth before them, with their own lone lantern hissing and casting around them a tiny umbrella of light not unlike the larger one thrown by the distant stadium, or even the wavering gas flames from those little tents set up on the outposts of hell, awaiting their final reckoning.

  Moths swarmed their one lantern as they crept through the darkness, searching with their eyes but also their hands for the finest and rarest of the fossils. Sometimes the rivers of wind above would shift direction—as if, in their ceaseless flow, they encountered some imaginary or invisible boulder and were momentarily rerouted—and in that stirring, Richard and Clarissa would be able to hear new sounds, the faint and far-off clunk and rattle of one or more of the desert’s pumpjacks. And to Richard and Clarissa, working down on their hands and knees, with the old reef’s river winds carrying the sounds toward them, and then away, it sounded sometimes not monotonous or arrhythmic, but like a kind of music; one that was as graceful as those rare moments of animal glide were for the running boys. Moments—fragments of moments—that they would remember forever.

  They could both taste the peculiar and specific flavor and odor of the chalk dust as they broke the ancient fossils from the limestone grip of history: and Richard worked for the mystery and romance of being out on the plateau with Clarissa, and beyond the reach of the regular world.

  Clarissa worked for the money, pocketing each Jurassic nugget, each Cretaceous sheet of fan coral, as if it were a typeset character from the ruins of the printing press of some grander civilization.

  But despite the brute e
conomic accounting of her search, and her desire to ride out of town, out past time’s reckoning, she too was beginning to feel the faintest flickers of warmth and mystery, and the romance of it—those waves lapping at the previously firm sand beneath her bare feet, swirling loose sand now around her ankles—and like babes, or the ancient and the infirm, they crept on, groping the twisted, clastic texture of the reef, focusing on one tiny fossil at a time, while above them the world bloomed huge and alive; and with each swing of their rock hammers, more dust filled their lungs, so that it was as if they had reentered and were swimming in that reef, swimming in choppy waves, and were descending.

  They began to like the chalky, acrid taste of the dust. It began to fill their throats and lungs, so that it was as if they were literally eating the mountain.

  Whenever they stopped to rest for the night—shutting off the lantern and laying their rock hammers by their sides and curling up in a blanket and staring up at the stars, and listening to the rivers of wind above them—it would seem to them, those evenings, stranded out on the frozen reef, that they had finally crawled out some exciting and necessary distance ahead of the waves—had reached the unknown shore—and closing their eyes for a short and intimate nap, they would lie there on the bare pale stone, every bit as motionless as the myriad fossils around them.

  The inland salt lake—Juan Cordona Lake—was perched above the plains just a few miles north of Horsehead Crossing. The lake was a scalloped basin that sat balanced like a shallow dish atop the buried cone of a subterranean salt dome, an entire underground mountain of salt.

  The weight of the overlaying world was constantly squeezing down and re-forming this shifting, malleable, underground salt mountain, so that its movements were like those of an immense animal lying just beneath the surface, and almost always stirring.

  The inexhaustible breath from this animal, the plumes and glittering grains of salt vapor, mingled ceaselessly, through simple capillary action, with the shallow waters of the lake or playa, saturating the lake (which was fed only by intermittent seasonal rains) with its brine and then supersaturating it, until the lake was no longer a lake but a sea of floating salt sludge, thicker than cake frosting.

  The breath of salt kept rising, pulsing to the surface, salt being milked upward by every ounce of fresh water that happened to fall within the dish of the lake; and all that water then evaporated almost immediately, beneath the brain-searing heat (a heat that was magnified by the walls of pure white sand dunes that surrounded the lake, building in times of high wind to crests in excess of fifty feet tall; and the heat was magnified too by the gleaming-bone radiance of the salt flats)—so that what was left behind was a residue of pure salt, oozing slowly, steadily, from the salt mountain so far below, as if from some wound that would never heal.

  The lakebed became saltier each day—the thing that would have diluted it, rainfall, ended up only contributing to the increasing salinity, luring or summoning ever more salt upward—and any lost traveler staggering across those dunes who might have happened to take the maddened trouble to climb, for some random and inexplicable reason, any of those fifty-foot hills that helped form the high wall around the lake, would have been confused at first, believing that an unknown inland passage might have just been discovered; and in the blazing, brilliant heat, the thirsting traveler might have wondered whether the ocean below belonged to the Atlantic, or the Pacific, or to some other and perhaps newer ocean, entirely uncharted, running narrow and sinuous through the country’s center.

  The sun-blistered traveler would be able to sit on the cornice of the giant sand dune and taste the spray of salt that the drying winds hurled, so that if the traveler stared long enough, there would soon be a thin mask of rime in the shape of his or her face, gritty but clean, and the traveler would be able to wet his or her lips and taste the brine of the grains of salt.

  The traveler’s eyes would sting and tear from the spray, and with the sides of a thumb, the salt would be wiped away, and the traveler might then turn, without venturing down that last perilous slope to visit the great and seemingly useless lake of salt—he or she frightened, for some unknowable reason, and like a balky animal unwilling to go that last short distance.

  There would however be other travelers who, after wiping away that glistening salt-mask, would forge ahead; who would push on over the edge and run cascading in ankle-deep heated sand down the front wave of the dune, and out onto the salty floating sludge of whitened crystal, their skin baking as if they had wandered into an oven.

  There, at lifeless shore’s edge, they would behold the detritus of generations of despoliation and meaninglessness. It might seem to any of them that they had been led here by accursed destiny; but thinking back on their journey, some of them would remember there had been signs and clues all along that they were bound for this place.

  All cultures of man had been coming to the lake, determined to find use in the abundance, the excess, of that most basic and mundane of elements, salt (had it been a lake of shit, they would have mined it and carted it away for fertilizer); and in their remembering, the travelers would recall that there had been footpaths worn deep in the desert hardpan, seemingly all ascatter but actually lying upon the desert like the widening spokes of a wagon wheel, radiating from some unknown hub.

  The paths of the old salt traders were scored with the labored cuttings of wagon wheels, and lined on either side with the bleached bones of man and animal alike, the skulls looking at first like so many stones or boulders, so that even on a lightless night the traveler would have been able to continue along the trail, navigating by those pale markers alone.

  Some days the density of the floating sludge, the bog of it, was such that a man or woman could walk gingerly across it, testing and retesting with each footstep, avoiding the weaker or soupy places and stepping only on the firmer patches—the traveler’s footsteps sinking nonetheless a few inches into the salt crust, so that his or her tracks would be clearly visible for the return trip; though most insidious of all, the localized densities were in constant flux, and never with any discernible physical differences, so that on the traveler’s return trip, the route would have to be changed completely.

  Patches of salt crust that had been dutifully firm only moments before, which still bore the glistening proof in the form of the traveler’s own footprint, were now no longer trustworthy—were less than trustworthy, in fact, treacherous and beckoning—and the traveler would have to pick and choose, step by cautious step, a new route back to where he or she had come from.

  Sometimes such a route could not be found, and the traveler would fall suddenly through a crevasse or abyss, a soup hole, vanishing from sight and history. Other times the traveler would simply become mired, as the sun baked to a thin salt crust certain sections of the lake while melting the sparkling, glistening glaze of others: and in those spots, the traveler would perish, baking in the brilliant heat long before he or she died from a lack of water.

  Sometimes the traveler would, in the repose of death, slump forward, in those final moments, dying on all fours; and the wind-whipped sprays of salt that had so tortured him or her for a day or two would continue to lash at the unfeeling carcass, coating the kneeling form with a shining rime until finally, after a few months, nothing remained visible of the traveler save for that anomalous humped mound far out on the lake’s surface; a shining salt mound which, if someone on the shore squinted their eyes, might be perceived as possessing the rough outline of a kneeling person, as one is able to see in the drifting rearrangements of towering cumulus clouds similarly fantastic shapes: seeing the shapes of whatever it is one desires to see.

  Other times, the traveler would expire while still standing, having breathed his or her last panting breath—the traveler’s burnt heart having leapt wildly, but in ever-shortening leaps, caught there in the sagging cage of its own rib bones. (He or she might last a full day, upright, and might know then the fevered respite of a short summer evening—but whe
n the sun rose again the next morning, the dawn reflection illuminating the frying pan of salt glaze so that it looked like lava, the traveler’s will would break, and by noon he or she would have succumbed, cooked to a crisp.)

  Rather than crumple forward, to be baked like a roasting oven-chicken, the traveler might fall backward in those final moments, arms flung outward as if upon some shortened crucifix; and when this happened, the traveler would disappear quickly beneath the salt.

  There were times too however when the salt’s grip around the traveler’s knees would result in him or her falling back into a leaning, forty-five-degree position; and such would be the traveler’s weakness, in these instances, that no clench or contraction of leg or stomach muscles could effect a movement back into an upright position, so that for a while the backward-leaning traveler would flail and paddle his or her arms, trying to claw his or her way back up by clutching nothing but air. Such efforts were rarely successful, however, and eventually the traveler would succumb, leaning back as far as those sun-slackened muscles would allow.

  The pressure on the protesting joints and ligaments, unaccustomed to such positioning, was excruciating, but the muscles required to remedy the problem simply had no fire, no powers of resiliency left, and the traveler would die quickly now, caterwauling, once he or she fell backward, or halfway backward.

  And after the last cries had been uttered, and the last twitch of complaining arm had stilled—the traveler’s mouth gaping open as if in song—the windblown salt would begin to shroud these carcasses, too, creating gruesome statues.

  Sometimes the salt shrouded first one side of such a monument, before shifting direction and encrusting the other side. The result was that the sculptures grew in size daily, salt ghosts, as each new layer of salt accrued in roughly the same shape as that which had first been deposited upon the form; and not until some mass had been reached that exceeded the physical laws governing such accumulation would slabs of that vertical salt begin to fall from the still-upright traveler, so that again to a viewer on the shore it would now seem that the monstrous sentinel in the center of the lake was shedding one overcoat after another; and as if emerging from a cyst or cocoon, the man or woman would reappear, out in the salt flat’s center.