by Rick Bass
Sometimes the gritty wind would have stripped from the traveler every article of cloth and every ounce of flesh, so that as the wind whistled through the latticework of open ribs it would make a music, punctuated by the keening that oscillated through the grinning skull, and the vacant orbitals of nostrils and eyes—a sound like the music of bagpipes, and all the more eerie for the sound’s provenance, which was indisputably coming from that one lone upright skeleton, stranded just beyond reach.
Other times the salt and wind did not destroy the cloth and flesh, but cured and preserved it, so that once those salt husks were shed, it might appear that no harm had befallen the traveler.
The shirt the traveler wore would still be a brilliant blue, and the traveler’s black hair might still be fluttering in the breeze. The muscle tone on the outstretched arms would still be taut and firm, and it would appear, from the distant perspective of shore, that the figure was only resting, but that his or her intent and resolve were still strong.
On the rarest of occasions, the traveler would indeed survive, and be set free, later that same day, or in the middle of the night, or in the next day’s rise of the orange sun. Ever so rarely, the salt would miraculously release its grip, and after hours of the traveler’s futile struggling, a swirl of water might pool up around his or her mired legs, loosening the salt’s cast; and with no more effort than wading a shallow creek, the traveler would suddenly be able to lift one foot, and then another; and cautiously, he or she could resume the perilous journey toward shore—alternating the route to account for the constantly changing patches of firmness, and the constantly changing patches of treachery.
Other times, when the travelers succumbed, they acted as lures or attractants for other victims. A man might ride up to the lake and see a person stranded out there, seemingly alive and thus savable, and hurry out with a lariat, intending to get as close as he could, hoping to toss a rope to the stranded person and reel him in.
The cowboy might throw a loop over the ensnared (the traveler’s back facing the cowboy, perhaps), only to find out, upon pulling, that the person had ceased moving a hundred years ago, or longer; and at the rescuer’s tug the skeleton might snap in half, as brittle as the desert-bleached keel of the skeleton of some tiny shorebird.
The rescuer might end up saving only a sun-withered, mummified arm, a bushel basket of ribs, or nothing at all. Other times the rescuer would end up with less than nothing, and would become mired himself—sometimes afoot, other times on top of a spirited horse—so that there would now be a new addition to the slowly evolving diorama; and a few weeks later, a new glittering statue of salt crystals would have been erected.
Nor were rescuers, or would-be rescuers, the only ones lured out to join the other motionless travelers on the salt plain. Scalp hunters, perceiving easy pickings, sometimes could not resist; and in their greed, they were stopped well short of their quarry. Buffalo wolves, down from the north, and little red wolves and Mexican wolves, and black bears and grizzlies, also attempted to creep out onto the bog of floating salt, to nibble at the delicacies that summoned them, as did the little coyotes, after the wolves and bears had gone extinct; and sometimes they were successful, while other times they too were captured by the hungry sucking maw of the salt, so that always a menagerie or carnival was appearing out in that dangerous, glittering amphitheater, and the story remaining always the same—desire, failure, rescue, longing, foolhardiness, prudence, fortune, misfortune—with only the array of alternating characters, man and beast alike, changing across time.
Alone among the lake’s visitors, only the birds were safe. The vultures and ravens were free to perch on the heads and shoulders of the stranded and sinking travelers, pecking at whatever desiccated scraps they desired, and the warblers, vireos, and flycatchers were free to ferry straw and sticks out to the carriage-bone houses and build nests upon the scoops of clavicles and in the hearts of the pelvises, raising their young in these nooks and crevices.
Violet-and-green swallows were free to dab mud nests beneath the grinning skulls, up tight against the vertebrae of the neck; so that again, when the eggs hatched and the nestlings were first attempting to fledge, the chittering, plaintive cries they sent out to the desert sounded yet again as if the skeleton had resumed singing; as if the voice of that traveler could never be stilled: and whether in lamentation or celebration, a listener would not have been able to gauge, but would only have been able to marvel at the unparalleled tenacity of life, the unstoppable longing of it.
And in this vein, it would have struck an observer how the salt plain was always on the move. It was as if the mechanical model for life were so well designed that it would continue to run by itself for some indefinite time afterward, even in the absence of life.
The vultures would shift their weight from one skeleton to another, and the skull or arm of one of the skeletons would fall off, giving the brief and sudden impression that some residue of life or energy had bestirred.
Or the final meniscus of cartilage would wither and stretch, within the skeletons’ knee joints or hips, allowing them to pivot in the wind like weathervanes; and sometimes the winds would gust, spinning the sentinels as if they were all partners at some select cotillion: and for those that were still robed in tattered garments, or whose sun-dried skin had been pecked and peeled away to curl like cowhide, so that from a distance it looked as if they were wearing leather coats and vests, the jackets would flap, as the weathervanes spun, adding to an unsettling image of gaiety.
Occasionally, in gusting winds in which the weathervanes spun around and around, as if enthused with glorious indecision, the heated friction of the spins would be too much, and the skeletons would snap off at the knees and topple over with a faint clatter into the salt, where sometimes they would become detrital mounds, though other times they sank quickly, to a depth of a foot or two; and suspended thus in the saline solution, they would be perfectly preserved forever.
A man or woman poling along in a canoe or flatbottomed skiff would have been able to navigate sometimes by the upright gray-white spars of the standing skeletons, and the remnants of skeletons; and on an overcast day, one in which the sun’s glare had not lit the entire lake surface into millions of dazzling, glittering salt crystals, the paddler would have been able to look down at almost any point in the journey and see suspended in the salt mire like schools of fish the motionless residue of someone’s ancestors.
Richard wandered through the script of his days, unaware of any patterns of history or consequence, taking each day instead as if carrying mindlessly but enthusiastically one heavy stone that, at day’s end, he placed in a pile before returning the next day with another, until finally, eventually, his vision for various things became so acute that it seemed gradually that it was as if he had been chosen all along for the knowledge of such things—and even chosen, perhaps, for Clarissa, after all: for it was not long after his fluency with the landscape began to mature that there was awakened in him, like a corresponding echo, the desire to see as deeply beneath the mask of the hidden animate things, the things that a frightened heart withholds.
And in that learning, he found that he desired to travel deeper into that territory.
He did not tell Clarissa of this newer, and secondary, yearning. But she could scent it, as it developed, as surely as the odor of salt in the air, and as surely as is felt the crispness in the autumn from the first night-wind down out of the north; and she hated feeling that change occurring within him, that developing hunger. Always before, there had been the tacit understanding that it would be just sex and companionship between them, nothing more; temporal, as shallow as the lake.
He was young and awkward. He was not to prove as gifted at gaining entrance into her hidden fears as he was at discovering treasures hidden beneath a static landscape. Hers was a moving target. There might yet have been somewhere a traveler or hunter with the ability to know her heart and gain the wildness of her trust, but such skill did not belon
g to the young miner Richard was then.
It did not keep him from falling. And it did not keep her from despising and being further attracted to him, in that falling.
They would picnic at Juan Cordona Lake, in the early evenings and on into nightfall, and on overcast days and, finally, in the brilliance of day, which was when Richard most enjoyed being out there, and when he most wanted Clarissa to be there. She loved the lake, too—of all their explorations, it was her favorite place—but she was terrified of its brilliance and heat, which was a step up of a quantum order from even the searing potential of the dunes. She was certain that thirty seconds’ exposure to the lake would fry her creamy skin to the color of an iron skillet.
In the months before she had met him, and before she had swum Horsehead Crossing with him, and prowled the reef on her knees at night with him, and even safely wandered the sunlit dunes with him—terror high in her throat, at that last venture, but a giddiness, too, after it was over and she had emerged unburned—she would never in ten thousand years have gone out to the salt lake in the broad light of day; but because he was earning bits and pieces if not all of her trust, and because he was helping kindle some warmth if not actual spark within her—not fire, but warm, pleasing friction—she acquiesced, and followed him out into the very place that held more fear for her than any other; the place that was capable (or so in her fear she believed) more than any other of destroying the only dream she had ever had or known.
And in his company, she began to taste the freedom of what it was like to first feel that warmth, if not burning, down inside her center, beneath that carefully protected surface.
What was reckless for her—a glimpse of the salt flat’s high-noon brilliance—would of course have been commonplace, mundane for another; but the borders of her fears were her own, and there were times, when with him, that she pushed against them as gamely as any high-altitude mountain climber ascended some final summit.
Even a good man is still a man, she told herself, and she feared that there was some part of him that was so bent on her seeing the salt flat at noon simply because she was resisting it; that only her fear attracted him, just as the flight of prey summons always the attention of the predator. Both of them would have agreed, honestly, that there was some of that.
But because of what he had shown her of Horsehead Crossing and the Castle Gap notch, and the dunes—because of his pagan celebration of the elemental things and places of his life, and because of his strange goodness—she gave him more faith and trust, as one would a young horse that one had been working with on a regular basis.
And she would have been honest too in admitting to herself, as well as to him, that his unselfishness was an attractant to her, so lacking was she in this characteristic; and that in this way it was also as if she was the hunter, her attention drawn by the appearance of the very thing that had thus far eluded her.
For his part, Richard wanted her to see how otherworldly the lake could be, under the cruelest of conditions; and how the world could become inverted, or so it seemed, in the blink of an eye or in the dissolution of some final impediment to the heart. Given one last breach, new rules and beliefs could come flooding in.
The thing that was her terror could become—given one more attempt, one more day of trust or effort—a source of almost overpowering beauty.
He wanted her to see how the movement of halite crystals, stirred each day by the same winds that rearranged the dunes, sometimes helped sharpen into angular prisms nearly every salt crystal on the lake, trillions of such prism-diamonds exploding the lake into a pulsing iridescence of almost maddening beauty, a phenomenon that was witnessed most powerfully either just before or just after the sun’s zenith.
The curves and waves of radiance were different each time it was viewed. Sometimes little wind-driven eddies of salt would form tiny ridges, only an inch or two higher than the surrounding peneplain; but that faint topographic relief would be enough, when the sun’s angle finally properly bent and ignited the bouncing, magnified, colorful rays through those crystals, to throw arcs and coronas of banded light up into the air above the salt lake, in addition to scattering the light like spilled gemstones across the lake’s heated surface.
When the light entered each day’s arrangement of wind-scoured halite, it was like watching energy entering a filament, like life being born. That was the good part—not simply ascending the crest of some sere and gigantic dune to look down upon the bowl of light and color, a sight all the more fantastic for the nearly absolute absence of color elsewhere in the desert (only the occasional bloom of cactus, or the lime and lemon and watermelon hues of the passing-through songbirds)—so that it seemed logical and natural to the viewer to understand that perhaps on some level it was its long absence that had finally summoned the missing thing.
Best of all was to be there already waiting for the phenomenon, and to see its birth or arrival: to hear the lake’s shallow salty waves lapping against one another in the night, stirred by the wind and by the clockwise turning of a sleeping or resting earth; and to see the idea of incandescence conceived, then, in that first dim light of dawn, and to watch the light’s approach, reaching its fingers in strafes through the flat-cracked tiles and the individual nuggets of salt; the light and the color being born, then, soundlessly, but with an onrushing beauty that seemed to possess a shushing sound, as the image of the salt lake bedazzled, caught fire, and leapt into the viewer’s mind.
In those moments, beholding such transformation, with the full knowledge that the dull, brown, regular world lay behind them now, it would seem to the viewers, to the travelers, that they were looking at nothing less than the biblical streets of heaven, lined with silver and gold and gemstones; and it would be both a wonderful and frightening revelation, in exchange for which privileged vision great things would be expected of them; and that they would have to reach deeper than they had ever gone, to deliver.
It was important to Richard that Clarissa witness this. He told himself he would not push her beyond that point—that she would be free to reject or accept that vision of the landscape—but he wanted her to see it, and he wanted to be there with her when she saw it.
And perhaps he was pushing her, and being gluttonous, ravenous for her heart, as he began to consider, idly at first but then with increasing imagination, what it would be like to fall in love with her, and capture, and perhaps even tame, her frightened heart.
He considered children, a life of domesticity, family.
He did not let his mounting hunger preclude gentleness or kindness. He understood her fear, or thought he did, and took every precaution to lead her tenderly into the place he wanted to show her.
When they went to the lake, they traveled with two vehicles, towing a jeep behind them as an emergency backup. Richard carried extra gas and extra tubes of zinc oxide; extra water (over a hundred gallons of it; two barrels mounted atop his flatbed truck), and a large tent in which they would spend the morning hours, drinking tea as if on safari and cooking pancakes and bacon on the hissing gas stove, peering through the mosquito netting, sweating already at first light, man and woman nude again, and once more bechalked in thick paste, should any stray ultraviolet death come slanting in through the canvas fabric.
Clarissa was constantly reapplying zinc to herself, as the sweat rivulets traced little unprotected paths across the self-cherished vessel of her body, and they would pass the morning in the tent, watching and waiting, reading paperbacks or napping or lovemaking, and sipping tea afterward.
The greasewood campfire just outside their tent would still be smoldering from where they had stayed up half the night watching the stars, and walking the lake’s shore, searching by lantern light for arrowheads and other lesser memorabilia Clarissa might be able to sell to Herbert Mix, should the museum in Austin be uninterested. They would sometimes be able to pick up a few stations on the car radio—the smoke from the fire kept the bugs away, though always, the moths swarmed the flames—and
they would dance to blues and waltzes, the radio’s music faint and staticky, their bare feet moving eloquently across the dusty, salt hardpan, which in the moonlight was paler than their flesh, paler than bone, possessing in the night some luminosity greater and brighter than it had even in day’s full light.
To a distant onlooker it might have seemed that they were dancing on the level floor of some marble ballroom; though to the dancers, so severe and well-defined and alive were the senses that there could be no misinterpretation of anything but what was: they were dancing barefoot in the cool wind-cut dust of salt, the ground soft beneath their feet, the night cool upon their unclothed bodies, their hands warm on each other’s backs, the scent of the lake of salt richer smelling than even that of a churning ocean.
The Mormon crickets would be calling back in the dunes, the fire glowing and crackling as the coals popped and shifted and settled, indistinguishable from the static of the radio transmission; and perhaps sharpest of all, there would be the scent of each other’s body, a scent that was for them an accumulation of the events of the day: zinc oxide and sweat and clean time-washed sand and salt, sex and barbecued shrimp from the grill, and margaritas from the ice chest.
Even the scent of the sun still echoing from the canvas of their big wall tent was so sharp as to provide for them, in their mind’s eye, an outline of the tent—a kind of vision, in that regard, so deeply were the senses felt, those nights, dancing together in that salt dust.
There was no marble-floored ballroom. There was only something infinitely finer.