by Rick Bass
She would lie awake in the night listening for them, straining to hear if the sound of the wind carried with it the joyous cries of the coyotes, bringing her more visitors.
Her husband beside her, reeking of salt; the brute children above her, in the torturously hot loft.
Marie could hear the sand pitting against the iron walls and tin roof of her house. The old-timers who had told them that a house or other structure, if large enough, would anchor the dune, had for the most part been correct; though in the early autumn, when the heat abated slightly and the winds began to quarter, no longer driving relentless from the deserts to the west but easing down from out of the north, slipping through tall grass and then whistling and moaning through the canyons of Palo Duro and other time-cut slots in the earth, even the largest dunes would begin to shift.
And once or twice every few years, the dune above their house would envelop them completely: not with any final, thunderous collapse, but in a steady sifting, a stream-like pouring that was so sibilant, the sound of it barely entered their dreams.
Like badgers, Omo and his boys would burrow upward through the dune, pulling Marie on a rope behind them, sweating and sand-clad; and after about six feet of such digging, they would break back into the free and clear white sunlight, and their happiness at seeing it again might have raised a troubling question: why was a life of such hardship and misery so desired, even cherished?
Marie among them was happiest to see the salt earth again, and waded down off the dune and fell upon the crusty whitened hardpan ground, weeping and kissing it, while Max and the boys went out to the toolshed, which had been only partially covered, and began shoveling their house back out, working neatly and methodically in their labors as might a line of red ants whose path was temporarily blocked by some catastrophe.
They would have the house unearthed by dusk, and after exhuming it, they went out to their salt traps and gathered them in, and shook into their drums the salt, which sparkled in the light of the full moon.
For protection, they threw up a few more sheets of heavy iron, each time planting them vertically into the dune just above the roof of their cabin, to act as a kind of hood or shield; and each time, Marie refused to go back into the cabin that first night, so they would drag their mattresses up onto the hot roof to sleep.
That first such night, the boys fell asleep immediately, and Max Omo soon thereafter, leaving only Marie awake among them. She sat up and looked out at the shining lake, sparkling and glinting with every color of the rainbow, and appearing as a frozen pond in winter, upon which children might skate and play, or upon which young couples, new in love, might after winter’s thaw canoe and picnic. She was awake for a long time, listening to the breeze, and hearing, or imagining, the rustlings of the sand flowing against the flimsy tin.
She drifted off to sleep just before daylight, though her dreams were terrible, and it was a relief when the stirrings of Omo and the boys awakened her a short time later. They dragged their mattresses down off the roof, and Marie went out to the iron cookhouse, built some distance away to avoid overheating the cabin, and lit a fire in the woodstove to heat a pot of the cloudy, salty water for coffee.
She cracked eggs into the skillet and laid strips of dried mutton alongside the eggs. She mopped the sweat from her brow. She poured half a glass of wine and felt the day’s first trickle of sweat running down the groove of her back, bringing a strange chill and shudder.
She stopped and listened to a clanging sound out by the toolshed; Omo and the boys wanting to get a little work in before breakfast.
Later in the day, they all rode into town to buy a twenty-foot length of stovepipe, to install on their front porch as a crude sort of breathing apparatus, should the dune ever bury their house again. Omo joked, “If we wake up one morning and see sand pouring through it, we’ll know to buy thirty feet next time.”
As Marie shopped, she visited with some of the ladies with whom she had an acquaintance. When they asked how she had been, she informed them nonchalantly—no quiver in her voice at all—foolish pride!—that their house had been buried beneath a sand dune for a while, but that they had dug out and were all right now. And as she shopped, going from store to store, she pretended not to be able to hear the whispers behind her: as if the whisperers believed she lived in some other world, in which the normal physics of sound and conversation did not apply to her, or as if she were from a land so foreign that she could not understand the language.
“What do you suppose they do with all that money? They surely don’t know how to spend it on clothes.”
“Don’t those boys look feral?”
“I feel sorry for the husband—married to such a cold fish.”
For his part, Omo gave himself over to the landscape as might a lover made desperate. The movement of his days—the script of his routes and his activities—remained as constant as the meter of a metronome ticking for so long that its movements are no longer heard or noticed. But beneath the dull muscularity of his physical life, he was falling, falling without a rope; in love with the savage deprivation of the landscape.
And whenever he encountered excess in that land of deprivation—be it salt, or the heat, almost igneous in nature, that wrung all but the last of the water from his body and sent it in sheets down his chest and back—he fell even harder in love, without even realizing that was what it was; falling into the clefts between the abundance of one thing and the deprivation of another, falling through an incandescent pluming kaleidoscope of colors that belied completely the physical constraints of his salt-colored life and his methodical movements above.
As he fell, such was his lust for the act of falling itself, that in his gluttony he made no grasp for the heart or embrace of another with whom to share these wondrous flashing-past sights, as if the entire past as well as future of his life seemed to unscroll before him in each day’s dreaming: as if no possibilities had ever been compromised or extinguished, but instead still existed, fully formed, below.
Marie stood next to him in the daytime, and lay next to him at night, and gradually came to know as if through some sixth sense his enthusiastic and selfish, silent leave-takings.
And in his dreaminess, he began to cobble together strange inventions, fantastic contraptions designed to summon even more salt from the landscape. And if there had been any spark of love or hope left in Marie’s belly for him, some tiny spark that was somehow still alive, despite the inhospitality of the landscape, that spark was snuffed out as she came to realize fully the selfishness of those unshared imaginative travelings, recognizing that such imaginings were not merely escape from the barren landscape, but from herself as well.
There were a few tolerable years before her indifference grew to resentment; and in that graywater period, she would watch him go out to work each day with the boys, and held on to the thought or hope of him returning at the end of the day with a kind word, a pleasant touch, or (and as the years went past, she hated herself for even having imagined such a specific thing) some desert wildflower, or interesting small crystal, or the wing of a butterfly, of which thousands gathered at the lake in early spring and summer, sipping at the puddles along the shoreline and craving the salt—entire sections of shoreline alive, some mornings, with the feathered, arrhythmic stirrings and exhalations of their watering: as if the entire shoreline were breaking apart, and iridescent color was emerging from the salt plain, after millennia of sameness and whiteness.
In such large gatherings of others of their kind, the butterflies were not discomforted by the approach of potential predators, and on many occasions, drawn to the plenitude of color—the pumpkin and russet of fritillaries and monarchs, the corn hues of sulphurs, the periwinkles and azures of spring beauties—Marie had walked down to the lake and crouched hunkered next to the great massed gathering, to watch them feed and water at the lake as if they were the livestock of some finer, better shepherd.
But after the butterflies moved on in their migration
s, and the damp shores were littered with the bright husks of those who had died or been left behind (even the most aged of them living for only a few weeks), it was Marie who had to wander the spongy salt-whitened quicksand of the beach, picking up the more interesting specimens that had been left behind, gathering them as she might pick up shells at the oceanside. She brought them back to place in a small bowl at their dining table, not as if some offering of a strange or ritual meal, but merely a tiny presentation of beauty.
Not once did Omo or the boys ever stop to pick up even a single butterfly to bring home to share with her; and she hated herself for wanting them to, and then again—later into her term—she hated them for not doing it.
The landscape lying as heavy upon all of them as a giant mound of stones or sand; and they made no effort to climb out by pushing up higher through all the rubble. Instead, their feeble attempts at escape came in the form of burrowing and diving deeper, as was the habit of most of the other desert creatures who were not free to migrate, but who had instead been selected to remain in one place for the rest of their lives, and beyond: until they and their kind went extinct.
Thousands of torn and ragged butterfly wings might be blowing around the shoreline, following such a migration—whirls of flashing color caught in the brief turmoil of the dust devils that swept across the prairie—so that it appeared the butterfly parts had come back to life.
Occasionally, sitting in the shade of her doorstep, waiting, just waiting, Marie would have a butterfly wing brought her way by the whim of the wind, deposited neatly at her feet by chance; and as she descended, broken, it often seemed to her that the weight of her breaking—one giant wave after another falling upon her—came not from the last-straw weight of a thing so insignificant as a single blue or red or yellow butterfly wing, but from the final crush of a thing even lighter than that: the absence of even a single shining blue or red or yellow butterfly wing.
For a while—before the pain had been lithified—she remembered a time even further back; the time of Omo’s brief courtship. He had brought her flowers, and had been shy and gentle and delicate around her, and it had seemed to her then, as his attentions had gathered around her—this hardworking, quiet man, seeming unusually restrained in her presence—that she had somehow captured him: and she could scarcely believe the wonder at having done so.
And even after the boys were born, that feeling had persisted, for a while longer—that through some miracle, she had been blessed and gifted with such a man, and that she had been privileged to give birth to two fine and hungry, healthy baby boys.
It had seemed back then that good fortune had wandered into her life as might a strange animal she had been trying to coax or capture. It seemed as if the animal of luck had come wandering in from off the prairie, and had entered her corral in early evening, just before a summer thunderstorm, so that all she had to do was close the gate, sliding the poles in behind the animal, which appeared to be temporarily disoriented, lost, wandering.
Here is your home, she would think, rising from the porch and hurrying across the front yard to close the gate.
It would be some years more before her own unfillable hunger would be revealed to her. At that point however it became for her as if she had fallen through a thin crust: as if the animals she had captured, the herd of her family, had through their dull comings and goings worn that crust dangerously thin.
No amount of hazing or imprecations could drive these animals away, they had her cornered, and then the crust wore completely through and she was falling, arms upflung, falling with both hands splayed outward in a grasp for the life unlived, but it was no use, she had made the wrong choice, had bartered for attention rather than respect, for need instead of desire, for gluttony instead of generosity; and as she fell, it seemed that she was plummeting through a cavern filled with swirling brightly colored wings, but none were for her outstretched hands, all were instead ascending.
And in her lap, in her apron skirt, was a weight as dense and nonnegotiable as a farrier’s anvil, carrying her farther and faster to the bottom of the well, with the butterflies all escaping, rising in flutters up the shaft of shining light to the surface above, toward the jagged crater of light she had created in her punching-through.
The brush of their rising wings against her face, and the chaotic swirls and glimpses of color, was as close as she was going to get to the thing she so craved.
For his part, Omo was falling even faster; and again he embraced the anvil as he would a greedy lover. He dreamed of salt, stared at the small inland ocean of it, looked forward to digging the shaftwells into it, and loved or was at least reassured by the warbled, rattling sound the iron made when he and the boys pulled in the loaded sheets of salt each evening—a sound that was sometimes answered by the thunder and jags of lightning out on the darkened prairie beyond.
In such moments, what it felt like to Max was that the answering thunder, and its simultaneous lightning, was knocking loose old crusts and plaque in his mind—releasing him from old constraints, allowing him to work more powerfully and confidently at the one thing that he did best: the one thing he did so well, it seemed that he had been neither crafted nor shaped for it, but born ready for it, and had, by grace and luck, found his way toward it.
In retrospect, he would have said that they were the happiest days of his life.
Spindletop had been discovered in 1901, and in the subsequent years people had begun drilling for oil all over the state, searching in every conceivable nook, and proposing outlandish hypotheses. When Omo was thirty-eight he came up with a vision for how drilling rigs might successfully penetrate the layers of subterranean salt through which they sometimes attempted to pass. Drilling through salt had always before been problematic, because as the drill bit entered and then drilled through it, the salt, flowing like a liquid or a plastic, would surge against the drill pipe, binding the drill stem and causing the bit to stick firmly in the hole, so that the drillers could go no deeper, nor could they pull out.
The hole had to be abandoned, in such instances—the drilling platform disassembled and set up at some other distance, in a location perhaps less conducive to finding oil, for often the green-black crude lay pooled warm and waiting only beneath those treacherous shields of salt.
Omo discovered that by mixing enough salt into the drilling fluid as the pipe was rotated down into the earth, the heavier weight of that newly mixed salt water acted as a stabilizer, neutralizing the tendency of the underground salt formations to cave in upon the drilling pipe.
The benefits from his vision were incalculable. Because the weight of the drilling fluid was now heavier due to the added salt, there were less blowouts whenever the drillers’ bit encountered a buried pocket of gas. In the past, there had been little time to prepare for and evacuate a rig during such an encounter. A bubbling froth would come rushing back up the hole as the gas spewed into the drilling fluid, churning to the surface like the vomitus of some buried gargoyle. The mixture of gas and water would spray into the sky, and splash down upon the steel floor of the drilling rig in rude ejaculation. The driller and rig hands would have but a few short moments to run for cover, because any stray spark—the ash from a cigarette, or the sparking of magnetos from the engine of the rig itself—would be enough to ignite that gas, which would be converted immediately into an inferno, and the flames would melt the rig quickly into a puddle of steel. The vertical torches of such explosions burned sometimes for months, unable to be quenched or capped or plugged: burning until all the gas was used up.
How many lives had Max Omo saved with his invention, his idea? Such mercies could not be calculated, nor could the millions of barrels of oil and millions of cubic feet of gas that were able to be discovered and extracted now from beneath those previously inaccessible strata of salt; nor could all the good be measured that would come from the uses of that extra oil and gas: the hospitals constructed, the journeys taken by plane and car, the synthetic fabrics manufacture
d—the cities, and the nation, swelling, feasting on his idea.
He increased the demand for this product; but in so doing, a fine balance was tipped and lost, for salt now became valuable enough that enterprises sprang up to refine it straight from bubbling little outcrops in the Hill Country, and from the comings and goings of the ocean and tides. Max Omo’s salt was still of the highest quality for feeding livestock, and the drillers would still buy his salt if he cared to transport it to them; but for the purposes of cramming it down into a hole in the ground, never to be seen again, one brand of salt was as good as another, and the cheaper the better.
And again, the landscape seemed to snap some fragile synapse within, for with the new earnings Max Omo realized from the increased demand for his product, he poured all that money back into the purchasing of more land, radiating out in all directions from his beloved salt lake—wretched, useless land, heaps and dunes and gullies of sand: leagues of sand, unmappable and unsurveyed, as capricious as the wind.
Because of all of Omo’s purchases of useless land, the Omos were just barely hanging on, drinking warm salt water, and stale wine that was at the edge of vinegar, and eating moldy dried mutton.
Still Omo kept buying up one tract after another, voraciously extending his barren kingdom to a greater distance beyond his sight, even when he stood on the tin roof of his shanty, and then farther; his ownership extending beyond the horizon even when he shinnied up the hollow breathing pipe that towered above their sand hut like the crow’s nest of a tiny ship.
It was a simple equation—the more the landscape withheld from him, the more he had to have—and it was with nightmarish clarity that Marie saw the salt prairie’s effect upon him.
Why had she traded her childhood for this? She had been forced to give birth to the second child alone, save for the company of his squalling brother, two years older; even then, before they had moved out of town, Max Omo had been hieing off to the salt desert, and by the time he returned, the child had been born. (Out at the salt lake, she would later lose two subsequent attempts, each early in the term; she always imagined that they were daughters, and blamed everything—the landscape, Omo, the lake, herself, the odor of salt, and the odor of the boys.)