All the Land to Hold Us (12 page)

They slept in each other's arms, for warmth and for the taste of the sweetness of the summer that was going away from them forever now, the firelight flickering on their faces; and throughout the night Richard kept getting up and breaking off more firewood. And when the wagon and its wheels and axles were all burned (the steel wagon rims glowing in the night), he unfastened the skeletal horses from their yokes and harnesses as if turning them free, and burned the old leather, hardened and black as driftwood: and in that burning, the salt and minerals from a century ago, dry-caked from the horses' laboring backs, burned brightly in sputtering flames of silver and green, burning so hot that it melted the sand in their fire pit, shaping it as would the heat of a glass blower's torch into a perfect bowl, one which would years hence hold rainwater, on the brief occasions when a storm swept across the desert, and when the vagaries of the dunes had conspired to leave the glassine bowl exposed that day, rather than buried beneath fifty feet of sand and time.

And on those occasions, the desert creatures—collared lizards and desert kit foxes, coyotes and kangaroo rats—would come to the old fire pit and sip from that crystalline bowl, and then the sand would sweep back in like the tide and cover it all back up again.

The stench of the burning leather was what awakened Clarissa, just before dawn. In her dreams, she imagined that the odor was coming from her own skin, and even after she awakened, she could not shake that sensation; and like one who in the morning regrets deeply the dim memory of the night-before's revelry, upon awakening she no longer had any interest in pursuing either the treasure or the uncompleted story of their excavation, and was instead only in a panic to get back home before the heat of the sun returned: as anxious for that goal now as she had been for the discovery of more treasure the day before.

As if she had aged thirty or forty years in a single night.

The horses, free of their harnesses, had fallen over into loosened pieces of bone, as if the parts had been emptied carelessly from a large burlap sack, so disassembled now that even the idea of a horse seemed impossible.

Richard hefted the trunk of goblets onto his back, and Clarissa went over to the bride and shredded the tattered wedding dress, wrapping the gauze of it around her arms and neck, and also fashioned a crude veil.

She hoisted her parasol, and picked up the empty picnic basket, and together they hurried across the warming desert, Clarissa crying not so much from the pain of her sunburn as from the fear of its consequences; weeping at the realization of what she had done to her own precious and beloved skin.

 

Her skin passed quickly through all the stages of brown, and on into a blackness of char. Richard took her home and wrapped her in ice, lining her sheets with it as he might a gigantic fish that he had captured, and which he intended to keep alive a bit longer.

He stayed with her as long as possible, each night and day, during the times he did not need to be out at the rigs. When her pain was too intense, he carried her into the bathroom and laid her down in a tub of cold water and let the hose trickle water over her; and her father, who knew the pharmacist in town, was able to get morphine sulfate for her, under the condition that she use the pills only once a day.

The relief from the medication lasted but one or two hours, and the rest of a day's and night's measure was spent swimming through waves of pain: the crests torturous, and the troughs sweeter, if only by a fraction, with the dreams and memory of the last medication, and the nearing arrival of the next.

Her body, full of toxins, and with some of her flesh cooked and deadened, swelled so much that the blackened skin split in places, bursting like a hot dog left untended on a campfire grill. Richard and her parents took turns bathing these new wounds, each one as deep as the mud cracks in a gone-away pond, and these cleansings raised the scope or scale of her pain, until her twitching nerves and synapses were so frayed that her mind confused pain with pleasure; and as they tended to her she would sometimes smile and even croon a small song that at first they perceived to be cautionary, warning them to leave her alone to her delirium, but which came eerily to seem like what it was, confused or misplaced pleasure.

One day between wells and burn dressings, Richard took the goblets out to Herbert Mix's museum, where they were received with greater enthusiasm than Richard could have hoped for. Part of what made them so attractive to Mix, Richard knew, was the story of double travail that was now attached to them—not just the mysterious desert bride who had perished while transporting them, but the ruination—or so it was feared—of beauty.

Alarmed by the possible interest of other bidders, Mix borrowed from the bank the goblets' full value in gold and then tripled that number, so that he could purchase the collection as well as the story and its provenance, and ended up committing $35,000 for the purchase. (In the end it was he who was ruined; Clarissa's skin healed, and within six months the scars were unnoticeable, whereas Herbert Mix was never again able to climb out of debt; and after his death, some ten years later, a museum in Dallas was able to purchase the goblets, and the tatters of wedding dress, for one-tenth their original price.)

Clarissa almost broke. Or rather, she broke several times inside, as her skin began to crust in dark flakes and dust, and as the splits began to form scabs. She felt more reptilian than the oldest woman in town, and the irony was not lost on her: now that she had the money to leave town, there was no reason to do so. It was Richard, sunburned and with callused hands, who would be slipping away, while she remained behind, like some rock or stone sunken in a pond.

She dreamed of the lake and the cabin he had never yet dared mention to her—his own one damaged dream still held secret not like a card unplayed but like a map made on a scrap of folded paper and carried around for years, examined again and again until its lines are so known to the dreamer that it is as if the life has already been lived. But in Clarissa's own dreams, when she entered that cabin, it was not hers, nor was there ever anyone inside.

In her twisting, fevered sleep, she passed on by the cabin, and traveled farther, toward the unknown approbation of strangers, and toward a sound she perceived to be distant waves of applause—for what, she never quite knew, only that in the dream she turned in that direction; and as the splits and scabs slowly healed and the waves of pain flattened out, she no longer had the dream of the lit lakeside cabin in the woods.

Still, when she came back up out of the illness, it seemed that she had traveled far; and while she recognized the faces of those around her, she knew also that she had somehow been carried past them, and that in her absence, Richard too had traveled some distance.

For once, they had gotten out ahead of it, rather than being left behind.

Someone meek would have been tempted to pull into an eddy and wait for the current to catch up, or even to climb out onto shore and wander into the forest for a short distance, idle and blessed, waiting.

Instead, they kept traveling.

She touched the ridged scars on her arms and the back of her neck, and upon her face. An old woman in town told her that if she laid spider webs across them there would be no scars, and so each morning Richard and her parents went looking for spider webs, and brought them tangled and insubstantial to her, placing them on the worst skin-cracks. And inside herself, after having broken but not having admitted to anyone that she had broken, Clarissa determined to become a model, or an actress, regardless—whether her recovery left her with no scars or a thousand.

Because she did not have the courage to turn back, she substituted with resolve. It was all almost the same thing. She tried in her everyday conversations to keep secret from others her new knowledge and self-awareness—the almost unbearable acuity of the tiny space between courage and endurance, between determination and hope.

Richard could see it about her, however, and he wondered what she would do with that new perception. With a grace beyond his years, he made no effort to detain her, but let her flow on past: and he felt, too, that in some way he had already captured her, and that at some unknown level she would always be his, and he, hers.

He kept going out into the saltbush around town in the mornings, looking for spider webs, as did many others from town. The best way to transport the webs was to press them between sheets of cardboard; and at any point in the day, cars and trucks were driving up to her house, and passengers were getting out and carrying armloads of pressed cardboard and leaving them on the porch; and for the rest of the townspeople's lives, or those who had gathered the spider webs during the time of her illness, they would rarely be able to see a web without remembering that brief period in their lives when they had united to make pilgrimages to beauty; and of how, like a miracle, it had worked: of how Clarissa's skin had recovered completely, void of even a single scar, and of how she had gone on to continue being a flawlessly beautiful woman, by any account in the world.

 

All summer long, Richard's drilling success had been only average; but now that Clarissa had released him, as he had released her, his success improved. He knew this could be only an illusion, for each well location had already been decided far in advance, with Richard having plotted and selected the drill site long before he ever set foot on that landscape—but still, so dramatic was the change following Clarissa and Richard's letting-go that it was hard not to believe that there was some deeper partnership, unknown to the dreamers and participants, but existing nonetheless with foreordinance more omnipotent than the rigidity and fractured shiftings of the bedrock of the earth itself, the platey, labored movements of the groaning layers of stone. It was possible, Richard imagined, that this partnership would exist with equal dominance into the future as well.

 

In the last few weeks of his work in the Odessa oilfields, the ground began to cave in—gaping sump holes imploding, the skin of the earth collapsing in dozens of places each night. The belief among the townspeople was that in pumping so much oil out from beneath the ground over the last fifty years, entire caverns had been emptied; the subterranean earth had become dry and brittle, and had finally collapsed in on itself.

Such a phenomenon had never occurred or been noted anywhere else, but neither had such a volume of oil ever been extracted from such shallow depths, nor so extensively from limestone formations. The geologists and field personnel in town denied any responsibility, even though most of the sumps had occurred within a few hundred yards of an active field—but because the industry employed most of the town, there was little formal complaint; nor could anyone see much harm coming from the pits.

The land had already long ago been made nearly useless by overgrazing—one rancher had half a dozen cattle trapped for days in one of the larger sump holes, which was roughly the size of a football field; the rancher did not discover the sump, nor his herd, until the third day, by which time the cattle were weak with thirst, some lying on their sides, and he had to quickly build a ramp and scaffolding and lead them back up and out to safety.

Another rancher, an old drunkard, claimed that he had lost his best bull down one of the crevices that appeared overnight on his ranch. He claimed that he had put his ear to the ground and heard the bull bellowing down there. A neighbor went forty feet down, with a rope tied around his waist, before being unable to go any farther, but found no bull, nor any sign of the bull's passage.

Some of the pits and sump holes would go on to become hypersaline lakes, their bottoms coated with an alkali hardpan, the density of which increased with each evaporation, so that although for the first few months the sump holes had been capable of holding water and attracting life, they quickly became toxic, killing the birds and mammals that came to their shores to drink, the evidence unmistakable in the residue of skeletons encircling the newly formed salt-shining basins, with the smaller animals dying but a few steps from the shore, and the larger ones managing to travel some farther distance; though in the end they too perished while still within sight of the lake, their arms and legs and wings and necks craned back in the direction from which they had traveled, as if to stare with disbelief at the betraying landscape: the thing that had presented itself as being able to provide succor to them turning upon them instead to be the device of their death.

 

When the sump holes first began appearing, some of the residents had immediate surges of water pressure in their wells, so that after years of decline, the hydrostatic levels rose all the way up the well casings and blew the lids off the well covers, water splashing onto the desert and then spreading in the night—flowing now like an artesian well blessed by some holy person.

Many of the wells were contaminated, during the collapse—oil and saltwater drilling fluids mixing with formations that had previously been kept separate. As a result, their water now had an iridescent sheen to it, and an oily taste and odor; but many residents were so pleased with the increase in volume that they quickly got used to the taste, and there were several among them who commented that the new inadvertent additive had made them more regular.

The oil companies denied any link between their overproduction and the collapses at the surface, and denied also the films and ribbons of oil that were beginning to appear in the drinking water. When the transport pipelines broke and leaked oil into the soil, they denied that too, simply patched the leak and then covered up the spill with new dirt.

Clarissa cashed the check from the sale of the goblets and left town the same day that Richard departed, leaving even as he asked her to stay and live the dream of the life at the lake; leaving after he humiliated himself and her both by pleading for her to believe in it, or to at least try it.