by Rick Bass
There was the consideration of meat, but even in their need, the villagers could not bring themselves to defile so strange and elegant a creature, and instead they merely gathered around it, sitting and visiting amongst themselves and preparing meals on driftwood cooking fires, speculating and storytelling. For some time it was debated whether to place the tusks over the entranceway to the church or the cemetery, and they finally decided upon the church, preferring to risk the sin of sacrilege among the living rather than disrupting the dead.
The elephant grew in the sun for another two days, the hide thinning and stretching tighter, until it was so taut that when the flies buzzing around the mouth and eyes bumped into it, there was a thumping sound, as if pebbles were being tossed at a drum.
There was at first only the faintest, sweetest odor of rot, though the villagers could hear the myriad intestinal gurglings.
The villagers kept moving their seats and their cooking fires farther from the elephant, in anticipation of when it blew; and each day, they marveled at the increase in size, and wondered if in olden times any creature so large had ever strode the earth, or if such size was and always had been limited to dreams and death.
Some of the villagers considered lancing the elephant to release the pressure, but each time the suggestion was made, it was overruled by those who wished to see further expansion for no reason other than the spectacle. The issue resolved itself, as all knew it must, on the third day, when one of the ravens that had been gathering was finally able to pierce the drum with its beak.
There was a blast as if from a cannon, followed by a piercing whistle (the raven was sent cartwheeling into the river, where it drifted, stunned, before swimming to shore like a small mammal), and a gouting plume of iridescent pink and green entrail soup that released from the rent in the elephant’s side with the pressure at first of a fire hose.
The contents cascaded into the river, where the ejecta formed oily pools that rafted downstream, shining in the bright light, and the villagers backed away, stumbling before the toxic stench.
From a distance, they watched as the elephant shrank rapidly back to its normal size—the torrent of entrails lessening, after a few minutes—and the elephant continued shrinking, then, to less than its normal size: the gray sagging skin draping itself over and around the bones and clefts and angles that were no longer padded by fat or muscle, and with all the vital organs expelled vitreous now into the salty river.
By the time the expulsion had ended, the elephant seemed no larger than a logjam of bloated steers, a sight with which the villagers were more familiar; and with the elephant thus exposed and reduced, the ravens waded in, cawing and squabbling, pecking and feeding as if at a trough; and those that could not fit into the carcass perched upon the fallen sunken hulk, painting it with the chalk-streak graffiti of their excrement.
Their croakings and cawings summoned the coyotes and the village dogs, and even the golden eagles; and each day the feast grew, and each day, the elephant grew smaller—the world consuming it savagely, voraciously.
The villagers marveled at the speed with which so marvelous a creation disappeared, and soon enough the salt winds and heated sun, as well as the toothy gnawings and steady peckings of the birds, had scoured away the stench.
The villagers had at first believed the elephant would be too large to move, and had thought they might need to bury it beneath a salt mound, to keep its putrefaction from ruining their village and their water supply; but soon everything was gone except for whitened bone: and such was the size of the feast that the elephant had even summoned from down out of the mountains one night a grizzly bear, not the relatively rare oso negro but the mythic oso grande, which no one had seen in forty years. No one saw that bear, but the villagers heard the barks and howls of their dogs in a newer, more frantic tenor that could speak only to something rare and unusual and dangerous; and in the morning, along the river, they found the distinctive tracks of the grizzly, and for a moment, they turned away from the future and looked back into the near-past, back to a time when such creatures had still lived in the world, and when the sighting or existence of such a being had been neither improbable nor miraculous, but simply part of the fabric of the made and still-whole world.
Within a year, the elephant’s ship of bones had collapsed into indistinguishable silt-wrack, and the massive fertilizer of his repository had nurtured the growth of an enormous clump of willows and tamarisks, in which perched yellow warblers and painted buntings, scraps of color flitting and singing at the edge of the women’s vision as they crouched by the river and scrubbed their laundry.
For several years they kept a cautious eye out for the bear that had left the tracks, but were never gifted with any more sign; and though eventually the bear must have gotten old and gone off to die somewhere in the mountain, its own bones now a wrecked shipyard, in the villagers’ minds he was still always out there; because it had shown up after all such bears were thought to be gone, they now assumed that it, or another, would always be hidden out there; that a mountain range could never be entirely shed of its grizzlies, for then they would no longer truly be mountains. And in the same manner—accustomed so quickly and easily to the miraculous—they watched regularly, frequently, upstream, as if believing that the river might one day again deliver another elephant to them.
East or west, north or south; Mufti had too much freedom, could have traveled in any direction, and he lay there on his own beach for nearly an hour before deciding to travel downstream, walking instead of swimming.
He stopped to sip from the river whenever he got thirsty, and for the first several hours he kept a keen eye out for the elephant, scanning downstream and watching both shores intently, searching for either the resting animal himself, or for tracks that might show where he had exited the river, and made yet another escape back into the desert.
By early afternoon, however—his stomach queasy from the salty river water, and his skull gripped by the heat—he had already become accustomed to his loss, and forgot to even be looking for the elephant. He forgot everything, even his own survival, and veered off into the brushland until the fatigue in his legs and the slope of the terrain guided him back to the river.
He came to a bridge at dusk, and climbed up the embankment—he kept sliding and falling back—and once he was finally up on the road, a hard-surfaced blacktop, he curled up and fell past sleep and into a deeper unconsciousness. In the last beaconlight of sunset, the pavement was still so warm that the blacktop was malleable, as comfortable as a firm mattress, and it accepted the shape of his body.
With the desert already cooling, furry-legged tarantulas came out onto the road, searching for that last warmth—crossing the road like pedestrians, or as if convening for some scheduled gathering; and likewise, desert tortoises, Gila monsters, horned toads, and rattlesnakes slithered out onto the warm road in that last red light, passing by the sleeping Mufti, who was blissful, dreamless in his exhaustion.
Later in the night, the road cooled, and the cold-blooded creatures went on off into their burrows, where they would wait to be summoned by the next day’s heat.
Near midnight, a truck approached, a long-haul driver bringing walnuts from California—he would travel on to East Texas, offload the walnuts, and pick up a load of pecans to take back to California—and at first the driver intended to go on past Mufti, believing him to be a car-struck deer that someone had not bothered to drag off the road.
The driver, who himself had been in the land of near-sleep, his mind inhabiting a waking dream in which cocktail waitresses served him iced drinks by the blue waters of a Caribbean pool, shouted when he saw Mufti sit up, and then stand, just as the truck was bearing down on him.
As there had been with the laundress and the elephant down by the river, there was such a gap in the driver’s mind between the space of his having believed the innocuous shape to be an old dead deer, and seeing it rise and attempt to flag him down, that he could formulate no thou
ght other than sheer panic; and he drove on, trembling, for a couple of miles, before logic came back to him, and he understood what he had seen.
He turned the truck around and went back to pick Mufti up, and gave him a ride to East Texas, where Mufti helped him unload the walnuts and reload the pecans, and took him with him then to California, where Mufti worked with another circus, though not with another elephant, for ten more years: the next part of his life opening like the mere turning of a page in a book. As if it had all been but a story or a dream, and he had stepped simply from one life into the next.
Having lived all those years in the first, never dreaming that the next life lay full and waiting for him. As if all of the first, despite its splendor and detail, had been but an overburden that needed to be stripped slowly away, to reveal the undermost life next and further.
Strangely, it was Marie who reentered the rhythm of her old life most easily: or for a while, at least. While Max Omo began to spend more time standing at the lakeshore, staring out at the white haze that was once his never-ending quarry (the boys increasingly impatient with him, twitching and flexing their muscles like draft horses standing in harness on a hot day, unused and fly-plagued), Marie slipped back into her old routines as smoothly as any machine.
On her first morning back home following the adventure, she was up before dawn, starting the cookfire as she had innumerable others, preparing breakfast. If anything, for those first several days, she was almost thankful to be back in the comfort of her routine. It seemed once again to be the place she belonged in the world, and for better or worse, there was a reassurance in that.
As she worked, she admired the wooden handle of the ax she had wielded all of her married life, salt-stained with the sweat that had come ultimately from the old ocean that was now the remnant lake, being filtered through her.
She split the twisted ironwood as she had always split it, so unthinkingly as to approach some daily-murmured prayer; two pieces into four, four into eight, and the days falling away and then disappearing to near-nothingness, leaving behind nothing but the shaped and smoothed handle of a well-worn ax.
No prince was coming for her, but it did not matter, for it seemed to her that she was back where she belonged: even if the slot of that place had not been cut by her. She turned her back on the dream she had glimpsed—put Mufti almost completely out of her mind, and the elephant, too—and resumed splitting wood, and starting fires in the little iron stove.
Within only a few days the sun had melted the salt-cast trough of the elephant’s passage back to its previous planar smoothness, and the wind scoured and buffed the salt back to its old iridescent sheen.
Sometimes when she glanced out at the lake and saw her husband standing there, staring into dreamland, she would mistake him at first for one of the ancient sentinels that had been claimed by the salt; the wind flapping his sleeves and coattails, too, as if the fact had already occurred.
7
A STRANGE AND POWERFUL landscape summons strange and powerful happenings. They return again and again to such a landscape, like animals drawn nightly to the same oasis. And perhaps it was in this pattern that Marie found herself unable to turn her back entirely on the dream; or as if, even in turning her back, she could not be separated fully from it, for now it followed her, even if unbidden.
A scratching, rasping sound within her, of new grooves being cut, and water trickling, flowing down those grooves; and in her dreams she began to follow those new slots and canyons, even while in the bright light of day clinging tightly to the old routines, and to the ax.
Men came to visit her in her dreams, in the new country. They moved close to her, and she to them, easily. In the dreams, she and he leaned their heads in against one another, rested upon each other shoulder to shoulder; and in the dreams, she was astonished to be the recipient of tenderness and affection: and not merely the crude pawings that masqueraded as caresses in the brief preliminary to sex, but tenderness and kindness of its own accord, existing for its own sake.
In the dreams, among these strange men (though sometimes there might be a boy she had known from grade school, grown up now—hardened, and of her age, and understanding too well her weariness), she felt surprised at first but then quickly confident that she was deserving of such gentleness and attention—that indeed, the cup of his hand seemed made for the fit against the side of her face, and that, as with a violin, perhaps, the point of that chin fit perfectly, was made for the calm and worn-out cleft just above her collarbone, halfway between her shoulder and neck.
The best ones were the men who came to her quietly and simply took her head against their shoulder, and leaned theirs against hers, and the two of them would just stand there, each leaning into the other like sentinels; and she enjoyed their company, listened intently to whatever it was they had to say, whether trivial or significant.
She grew more and more accustomed to the strange intimacy of these encounters, the freshness of possibility, so that she began going to bed earlier each night, and stayed in bed longer in the mornings. And even once she was up and about, she moved more sluggishly: and on the days in which there had been no dream at all, no visitor the previous night, she would be moody and irritable, so much so that even Max Omo noticed it, and though he assumed it was simply a part of the aging process, contentment or happiness disintegrating gradually, he was nonetheless concerned, as he would be were any of his machines to begin emitting a faltering sound, a skipped beat, a waning in output.
A strange land summons strange inhabitants, and shapes them all to its own desires. As if setting up a stone wall, Marie was able for the most part to keep dreams of Mufti and the elephant from pouring in, though the welcome strangers continued to drift in; and she had other dreams, too.
Though she knew nothing of the circumstances, had heard no tales or rumors of their existence, she dreamed frequently of camels. Caravans of them had been used in her country only several decades earlier, during Army Brevet Captain John T. Pope’s staggering searches for water, in his years spent scouting possible routes for a transcontinental railroad. And although Pope had found very little fresh water, the camels had succeeded hugely, for a while. (Pope’s failure was colossal, even by the standards of the landscape’s harshness. Time and again he missed finding water by only a few miles. In his scratchings and diggings and drillings, informed by crude science and wild intuition, he often ended up drilling in the one and only place where he could avoid finding water. His own mental collapse, though slow in coming, culminated with his men wanting to mutiny, but still he pushed on, inflamed by the hunt. Near the end, with each new dry hole, he would become convinced that sweet water lay only a few feet deeper, and he would sometimes awaken in the night, and would attempt to steal the ash-tree ridge poles from the tents of his sleeping soldiers, hoping to attach them to the drillstring the next day, in an attempt to reach down another six feet. So spectacular was his strange failure that he missed—walked straight over the top of—the then-untapped Ogallala Reservoir, only thirty more feet below him, one of the largest freshwater aquifers in the world.)
What broke Marie, finally, however, was not the inattentions of any lover, nor the total absence of tenderness, nor even the terrifying whisper of the dunes slithering across her tin roof, but instead, the growling.
Despite his own new dreaminess, and the long sessions spent staring at the lake, Max Omo had not been able to sever his old ways entirely. In October, as the north winds returned to readjust slightly the cant and position of the dunes, he had completed construction on his latest invention, a salt-sorting machine that utilized a long steel cylinder, a barrel tube, which revolved endlessly, driven by the piercing, stinking labors of a steam engine that Omo had adapted to consume oil, coal, ironwood, sheep dung, or even the dried bones and hides of animal carcasses. Each day he and the boys fed the barrel tube as they would a penned but unruly animal.
A series of screens within the barrel tube led to various chambers that fi
ltered the grains of salt according to all their different diameters, before pouring the salt, now sorted evenly, into gunnysacks waiting beneath the revolving tube. Omo was then able to sell the finest grade of salt, for fifteen dollars a ton, to sheep ranchers, who would place it in troughs or mix it with their feed, while the medium-grade salt went to the cattle ranchers for thirteen dollars a ton. The coarse grade was sold to individuals for twelve dollars a ton, where it was used for freezing ice cream: a delicacy that the Omo children had heard about, but never tasted.
It was not the gruntings of the steam engine, however, nor its dank and briny scent, that broke Marie, but the rattling of the dreaded salt within the barrel tube: the ceaseless grumbling as the machine ate the lake, day and night, before spitting it out into sacks, which were carried away on the backs of flatbed trucks (by now the boys, though barely twelve and ten, knew how to drive); and the tube refilling again and again, the lake replenishing its dreadful cargo always.
She began to develop tics and tremors, insuppressible tremblings within—she could barely light the fires in the cookstove each morning—and the pleasant dreams vanished entirely, as if there was something now unworthy about her, something in her that caused her to no longer be able to receive them.
This hunger and absence only aggravated the tremblings, and she dropped things often, and forgot what she was doing.
As all her other senses began to shut down, deadened by fatigue, it seemed that only her sense of hearing grew sharper, until it was unbearably acute: and against her wishes, she would find herself straining to hear the subtle intricacies of the barrel tube’s sorting: the grinding of the gears constant and monotonous, though just beneath that, the faintest, occasional variations in the proportion of fine salt, whispering, and medium salt, murmuring, and coarse salt, groaning.
It became for her as if she was straining to pick out words and sentences from a conversation she could not quite understand, and made all the more maddening by her increasing belief that it was a conversation that was important and meaningful to her present circumstances, if no one else’s.