by Rick Bass
The joy she saw on their faces when they viewed a scarf she had painted that day, bringing it up to them from the depths of her concentration and presenting its beauty; their brown hands, or stumped limbs, touching the silk for the feel of it: as if the color cobalt felt slightly different from chartreuse, and chartreuse from magenta or fuchsia. The pleasure of the dream-journey of the painting and sewing sweetened for Marie by this second joy, the joy of her ascension to these other things.
What more, she wondered, could anyone ask for in this life? The mask of her identity seemed to be dissolving into a kaleidoscope of color. New air was entering her lungs and her blood, and she felt to be no more than sixteen years old.
She tried to explain it to Annie, late at night: and although Annie could see how happy she was, she could not understand entirely how happy, nor why, but was glad for Marie, and sensed that things were far different from how they had been even a short time ago, before the silk weavers had arrived.
Each day, in the heated, sleepy middle part of the day, Herbert Mix continued to watch the silhouettes of the women working, and was mesmerized by the speed of the silk being spun, and by the rise and fall, the flapping wings of the looms, and by the fluttering of the brush strokes as the dye was applied to the finished silk.
Often he lounged by the tent, in the shade of one of his old umbrellas, and was both soothed and stimulated by the gracefulness of the movements, and by the flashing colors; yet he continued to feel the old rift opening in him, and despaired at what he perceived to be a failure, on his part, against the test of desire; for should not the beauty strengthen and fill him, too, as it did the others?
Marie was all but unattainable, in her daily and nightly schedulings with the weavers, and for once he did not want to draw closer to her—afraid that his backsliding, his sin of hollowness, might somehow be contagious.
And eventually Herbert Mix withdrew, and brooded, and plotted, and wrestled with his weakness, and despaired in his failing, before finally succumbing.
His old tractor had not run in years, mice and dirt daubers had built their nests in its pipes and pulleys, and the oil and grease had hardened as if to stone. He was up most of the night disassembling and reassembling the iron beast, trying to coax it to run—a couple of times, the engine nearly turned over—but in the end it would not crank, as if trying to convince him to choose a path other than the one he had fallen back onto, and at dawn the next day, he gave up on the tractor and instead loaded his old jeep—a risk, he knew, but again, he perceived no choice, had given himself over to the immensity of his hunger.
He packed a lunch, a shovel, a couple of gallons of water, a sunhat, and a tent, and set out for Castle Gap just as the disk of the sun was clearing the desert floor. The morning was cool, and as he passed the procession of the football team, driving through the just-stirring town of Odessa, he waved and they waved back.
He lifted his hand in greeting to the men and women walking out into their yards to secure the morning paper, and walking their dogs on leashes, and as he drove past the scarf-fluttering homes of Mormon Springs, a wave of sadness came over him, knowing that some of those colorful remnants were Marie’s; and knowing, too, that when it was time for the silk weavers to leave, and to travel on to California, that she would be leaving with them: that no force on earth would be able to stop her, nor should it. He knew that it would be this way, knew it by the deadness of his broken heart.
And yet, farther out of town, drawn down the familiar path of all his many journeys from the years before, he felt almost good for a while, traveling freely, the promise of the day’s treasures not yet revealed. He took his straw hat off and let the wind stir his silvery hair, looked back over his shoulder to be sure that he had brought his shovel, and continued on, searching for his treasure, whether bones or gold, no matter; he was on the hunt once more.
He decided to choose skulls over gold, this fine first day. He drove along the Pecos for a while, remembering his vitality, and got out and went down to Horsehead Crossing, where, on that bright, cool, blue-sky day, he was treated to such a sight that he laughed out loud—clear simple laughter flowing from him as if from a child, laughter that seemed like it might not end, and that seemed, for a while, to be synchronous with the river as the water rolled past, lapping and gurgling.
It was a dry year, and the river was lower. It would still have been a dangerous feat for anyone to attempt its crossing, the current still strong, but in that period of lower water he was able to get closer to it, crabbing his way down the plunging washboard-cobble of accretia and conglomerate, toward the chocolate-colored gurgling water.
What his hands found there, as he clutched and inched his way down as close as he dared, and what he saw on the other side of the river, similarly exposed, sent an explosion of pleasure through his body.
On either side of the river, there was a new strata of bones, scoured to brilliance by the ages of passing water and the scrubbing of silt and gravel—the bones as polished as pearls, as white as ivory—and disbelieving, despite the authority of touch, he ran his hands over the cobbly smooth matrix of them, the steep bed of bones upon which he rested.
And in the ancient lacunae, there blossomed beneath his hands the map of the future, and he felt the map beneath him moving, shifting as if in a quarter turn and sliding, slipping down into the water.
He tensed and held on, tried to dig in with his heel and to clutch the sidewall of skulls. His fingers found the gaping eye socket of horse or steer, he was not sure which, and tried to find purchase there, but the fragile brow crumbled at his touch, and slowly, bumpily, he rode the map down a little farther, a little closer to the rushing river, which he saw now was only masquerading as a river, but was really something else entirely, something far more immense than he had given it credit for, voracious and perhaps immortal.
He could taste the breath of it now, saw that the river was a living thing that had to be fed steadily—that it was hungering for him with an intensity far beyond that with which he himself had ever hungered for anything—and even in his old man’s fright, he found this to be a thing of awe, even as he prepared to be consumed by it.
Still, he fought against it. Now and again his foot found brief and tiny purchase on the skull plate of a buffalo, or his hands were able to clutch and grasp at a momentary cleft between the ribs of some unknown creature as he slid ever so slowly down that washboard ossuary, with all the skulls grinning as they faced the bright mild morning sunlight that was illuminating them.
He thought of Marie, he thought of Mormon Springs, of Ruth and the children, of Annie, and of Richard, and the town of Odessa. He thought of his jeep up above him, and of himself as a younger man (though he had long ago already slid past that corollary strata), back when he had had both legs, the second of which would have now served him in good stead.
It was rough, sliding over all those knobs and protrusions, the time-crafted and time-carved minutiae of suture and indentation, each dimpled bone perfect for the attachment of long-ago muscles that were now so completely vanished as to no longer even exist in a single memory—every bit as gone, beneath that bright sun, as if they had never existed. His hands read it all as he slid, his old hands groping and fluttering, still cataloging all the way down, and when his booted leg splashed into the water, he was surprised at how warm it was, and not unpleasant.
He was not the first to have tumbled down this slope, drawn to this one final resting spot by the path of gravity and the contours of the surface, funneling him to the same place where it had funneled so many others; and falling no farther, he found that he was resting on top of something: a crude delta of boulder and bones.
He stood braced against the wall, the scrim of bone, and then, wobbly and trembly-legged, he sat down in the warm splashing water, the living water, and like a raccoon washing mussels in a riffling current, he felt and groped in the subaqueous nether for some clue to the identity of his benefactor.
Warm grit and
sediment stirred beneath his probing, and once, it seemed to him that the mass upon which he rested stirred, as if coming back to life, or as if it had never left the living, but had been only resting and waiting—waiting, perhaps, the release that could be granted or vested only by the arrival of one such as himself.
He turned and looked up at the wall of bones and skulls that towered above him: and whether he had been outcast, or had stumbled in through the palace gates, he could not be sure; though again, he was surprised to not feel sadness, and to feel instead a kind of happiness spreading through him—or if not happiness, then peace, and—again—a dulling, a waning, to his hunger.
The river’s hunger was enough. In its presence, his own hunger was puny, so insignificant as to be nonexistent; and in that vanishing, he knew an even larger and more secure peace—one which he did not think could be taken from him now, not even by Marie’s departure.
It pleased him to think of her bright flags and ribbons, and of the traveling troupe of weavers, the crews of color she would be joining. So much vibrancy that even years after it had passed on, it would leave the echo of that color like a wash upon the sand, and in the minds of those who had seen it, and who had seen it made.
He looked now at the tapestry of bones all around him, and at those on the other side of the river. He read those closest to him with more leisure now, with his fingers and with his eyes. Some he recognized, while others were not known to him—the bones of creatures come and gone long before the likes of Herbert Mix had ever crawled up out of the sea. He could only examine them and marvel at his place now among them.
In the tidy stratification of time and gravity, the cataloging of bones appeared to be resting in abacus-like arrangement of column and row. There appeared to be order and assemblage, even in the falling-apart and storing-away—it seemed surely that there was even reassembly going on—and down at eye level with the beast of the river, it seemed wider to him than it had from above.
And still, God help him, he wanted to live; and still, God help him, the bones on the farther shore looked more interesting and desirable than those over which he had just passed, and among which he was now stranded.
Is it this way, he wondered, can this be true? He wanted, in his enlightenment, to believe otherwise, and to accept the bounty before him. But he could not be sure.
Once more, he groped the substrate, the submerged promontory on which he knelt, but could divine no history. Each clue that was revealed to him seemed to lead in a different direction; and again, it seemed to him that the object upon which he rested was beginning to move.
He felt a wave of vertigo, and imagined that he was about to sink farther; that his sanctuary was brief, and that it, too, now, was about to fail him. That perhaps it had even lured him to this point, in order to be able then to deliver him to the river.
And to that farther shore!
He had not swum in many years, and never since losing his leg; but he pushed off from his resting spot and entered the current, not riding on his back with his foot pointed downstream as he should have, but instead breaststroking, trying to traverse the current.
He swam like a fish or a snake, breaststroking, but with his leg undulating rather than kicking; and as he found his rhythm, he became more comfortable in the current, more attuned to its runs and eddies, and he began to glide through it as would a fish or a snake: though still he could not breach the current’s turbulent center line, to gain the other shore.
He traveled for a long time, ascending and descending, swimming and writhing sometimes completely beneath the surface, before rising again, blowing a spume of air and spray of mist; and he rolled over on his back and floated, back-paddling, and watched the cliffside bluffs scroll past with their litany of exposed skulls, and he wished again that he was a young man, so that he could explore all that he was seeing—a man so young and strong that whatever his eye beheld was his dominion—but those days were so far gone as to barely even be worth remembering, and he drifted on, growing tired, the waterlogged weight of his clothes wanting to pull him down now. And riding lower in the water, and feeling the fatigue settling into his limbs, he began to look for a place, a nice sandy beach, where he could make his landfall.
He had no idea where he was, on the river; he had swum and then drifted into territory where he had never been before.
Little fish began to bump against him, skittering into him from various directions, as if in confused flight from the shadow of his passage. Something large dashed against him, like a bullet, and then a larger something, hard-shelled, like a turtle, drifted up against him from below, then pushed away: and he was certain that in its pushing away, he had felt claws.
He began to imagine, and then sense, that his one remaining leg was vulnerable—that to certain things, he looked helpless, and was helpless.
He imagined snakes, fish, frogs, desiring his flesh, and as he continued to be buffeted by the whirlwind of smaller fish, he began to feel certain that some single larger creature—a great fish—was chasing them, and following him.
He knew it was panic. He knew such fish no longer existed. He had found pieces of their platey skulls in his excavations, their reptilian armor and their dagger teeth, but they no longer existed, they were all gone.
And yet in his weakness and his fear, they returned—or one of them did—and he could feel it following him, nosing him from behind, bumping and prodding him as if into position for just the right bite. He could feel the swirls of water behind him as it opened its fierce mouth for a bite or perhaps to swallow him whole, and he rolled over onto his side, flapped his arms behind him and attempted to veer wildly, trying to throw the fish off course; trying to buy himself one more moment of life, and one more, and one more.
It was exhausting work, causing him to ride lower in the river, and summoned more energy than he had left. He knew he should abandon the centerline, where the current was quickest, and give up on his efforts to reach the other shore.
He was still witnessing the flashing-by cobble of the past, and if anything, his side of the river appeared as alluring now as had that farther shore—and as the current quickened still further, he began to smell a different odor upon the river, the frothy muddiness of increasingly agitated water, complemented by the underground clacking of large rocks: and rather than considering the possibility of what might lie ahead of him in the form of even more turbulent water, and rapids, Herbert Mix continued to concern himself with the danger behind him.
Logs and branches, seized by the unruly current, rose from the bottom and scratched against him as the spiny monster prepared him for its feast, positioning him just so with the shapings and urgings of its caudal and dorsal fins.
He could feel the fish’s entire presence now, dense as gravity—and once or twice, out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of one of the fins breaking the water.
He could smell the vile creature itself, even from beneath the water, and he began to tremble, and did something he had never done before, and gave up; he stopped paddling, and began to call out for help. He knew that he was an old man, too old, and that as the river prepared him for its feast, it had every right to do so—that it was finally his turn to join the wall of skulls—but still he fiercely wanted it to be otherwise.
He was struck by a rare and sudden vision of the future, his mind casting forward in a way that it had rarely done before, and he imagined himself a day beyond the moment: a single day into the void.
No one will even know what became of me, he lamented, I will be encased within the jewels and armor of the fish, my bones will be encircled by his bones, and taken into his bones, and someday someone will catch that fish and open it up, but there will be no trace of me, they will never even know I existed.
Or the fish will go uncaught, will die instead a distant death, and take its place in the wall of bones. Perhaps some further traveler will dig it up, will rap on its calcified bones with hammer and pickax, and will think it is merely a fish,
and not the echo of a man, not the echo of myself. Perhaps...
He shot through the river-slot of center current, between the two boulders guarding the entrance to the rapids like a gate, and was bounced into the air, upended, like a salmon ascending a waterfall, or a beach ball flipped skyward by the nose of a trained seal.
He did not wave his arms and legs wildly, seeking balance as if running in place, but instead remained perfectly still, scarcely daring to believe his luck, and unsure as to whether he had been saved, summoned by some benevolent force, or had indeed been shoved violently into the air by the snout of the leviathan that pursued him.
It seemed to him in the half second in which he was above the waves that he could see farther than he had ever seen: that he could see the entire length of the river, beyond the rapids and beyond even the deltaic sand beaches that lay hundreds of miles downstream. It seemed to him he could see the calm flat gray water of the sea; but when he fell back into the waves, the fish was upon him in a roar, attacking him as if with a dozen baseball bats, bruising and clubbing and stoning him, and as he reeled along through the turmoil, he thought strangely of the rise-and-fall action of the looms, and of the clack and clatter of those wooden bars, the movements so like those of a great bird preparing to take flight.
His old heart was in tatters, shot through with adrenaline and riddled by strain. He could go no farther, yet fish and river continued to carry him along, and he imagined, at the end, that he was a sheet of silk, still being lifted and stretched by the pulleys and crossbars of the looms—that his billowing colors, brilliant in the desert sun, filled the entire tent, casting ripples of color over all who fell beneath the shadows of his furl.
He perceived crimson, he perceived flashes of gold, and he paused and stiffened and stared upward with wonder and fascination at the brilliance above, and hoped that Marie would somehow be able to see these colors, to know that about him; and he continued to gaze upward, waiting for them to descend and fill him, as he had always waited and wanted to be filled.