All the Land to Hold Us (37 page)

The white room felt alien and yet familiar to him. Either way, it felt as if he fit it, at this point and time in his life, fit it as comfortably as if it had been made for him, or he for it.

He had not felt fearlessness in a long time, and sitting in the white room, staring down at the town that he thought had finally awakened, he realized that at some near level, he was not, or once had not been, all that different from her: that he might once have been as frightened of the future, and a world without her, as she had been of the past and the present.

I knew how to be fearless
, he thought, remembering those days spent in pursuit of her heart.
Do I know how to be fearful
?

Like Max Omo, or any other of the millions of men and women who had ever walked the face of the earth—like Clarissa herself—he had run for cover, had allowed himself to go underground, before his time was due.

 

After visiting a few offices, Richard was able to find some of the men and women with whom he had once done business—a drilling contractor, a land manager, an engineer, a production geologist—though even among these familiar haunts, there were not many whom he remembered, or who remembered him, or him and Clarissa.

The turnover was high, out in the desert. He finally found someone who was able to tell him that her parents had died; but as to Clarissa, no one had heard, no one knew.
No
, to the best of their knowledge,
she had never come back. No, they couldn't think of anyone he might be able to ask
.

The people he questioned regarded him with pity.
You were lucky to have her
, their looks told him plainly.
You will never have her again
.

 

Richard called on Herbert Mix, wandered by the old skull gatherer's warehouse later that afternoon. It was the first time in nearly a decade in which he had not worked two days in a row, and he liked it.

Mix was out in the backyard, having just laundered his sequined suit, and was hanging it to dry on the clothesline. He had not sold a dousing rod in years, his willow garden was overgrown, an impenetrable rainforest that he kept watering anyway. Inca doves, bright tanagers, buntings, and vireos nested in its farthest reaches, and odd-gaited neighborhood cats, dingy and pink-eyed, their brains cooked to delirium by the desert heat, skulked the perimeters.

Mix carried a BB gun, a toy rifle on a sling, and whenever he spotted one of the marauders he would set his cane aside, lower himself to the ground like an ancient commando, and lob a stinging round at the cat before levering in another round and firing again. His aim was good, and the first time Richard witnessed this—standing at the back gate, unannounced—he understood why the cats were limping, and wondered idly why Mix did not just kill them, if he was so intent on protecting the precious songbirds, but then understood: the old man was lonelier than ever. Not crazy, just lonely; and watching him, Richard felt for the first time ever a touch of fear, a questioning about his own distant Clarissa-less future, and wondered if perhaps he should have stayed down in the Sierra Occidentals with Sy Craven and the others, where at least he'd had a home, a routine, and a future, even if it was no future at all. China, and Africa, and relentless root-hog grubbing: more oil, then death.

Herbert Mix pushed himself back into a standing position, then limped over to where he had stung the cat and scratched through the sand with the tip of his cane, his gimlet eyes squinting. Spying the pellet, he bent down and picked it up, polished the tiny gold piece on his shirtfront, then put it back in his ammo bag, more frugal than ever; as if by a fierce enough accounting, the old man might be able to stave off his immense fears, which might not even have been those of the simple void of death, Richard saw now, and a loss of all the senses, but amounted instead to some darker reckoning, both of the void below and the realm above, where time was wasted, less significant even than the sand sifting through his fingers.

And disturbed suddenly by such a sobering interpretation of the world—
Is this what Clarissa had seen
, Richard wondered,
and if so, how had she remained sane
?—Richard was about to turn away and depart, unannounced, leaving the old man free to grub for his spent BBs in peace.

But from the corner of his eye—hungering, as ever, for a passing-through treasure seeker, a pigeon, a mark—Herbert Mix caught the glimpse of movement, and waved to Richard, and hurried over to greet him, recognizing him instantly, as a father might his son; as if ten years was nothing.

Believing, perhaps, that there had been only a dull cessation in the relationship, and that Richard had returned with some grand object of commerce to trade or sell to Herbert Mix: a treasure all the more rare and wonderful for the waiting.

And for a moment it seemed that Mix was caught in the ten-years-past, for he looked around as if expecting to see Richard's partner with him. He even inquired after her, unable to quite remember her name, though certainly remembering her image. “Where is—she?” Mix asked, faltering over the name—“your friend?”—and Richard's face fell as he answered, “I was hoping you might know.”

 

They sat on the back patio listening to the cheeps of the birds hidden back in the willows, drinking the iced sun tea that Herbert Mix had made that morning (stirring so much sugar into the pitcher that the last five or six spoonfuls did not dissolve, but remained on the bottom, gritty as sand), while Mix filled Richard in on all that had gone on in town in the last ten years, which was next to nothing; indeed, the day's parade, and the new school out at Mormon Springs, were about the only highlights.

There had been more drilling going on, there would always be more drilling—there were more caverns opening up out in the desert, abysses and sinkholes, and people's water wells were getting lower and sandier, and were starting to taste sulfurous in this, the eighth year of the drought—but the land had been through drought before, Herbert Mix said, and would be all right again after a couple of years of good rain.

“Not this year,” he said, looking up at the great blue above, the heat almost nauseating, “but next.”

He changed the subject away from the meteorological, then, and rather than veering toward the entrepreneurial, as he would have in the old days, he began to speak of something else.

“I've got a friend,” he said, delighted to have the opportunity to talk about her.

And what else might he have told Richard? That his hungers were abating? That he was happy? What world revolution or climactic upheaval could be more interesting, immediate, or necessary than that?

“I go over there two, three times a week,” he said. His heart leaping, wishing it were six or seven—so little time remaining!—and yet, the two or three times a week was enough that it seemed he was somehow with her even in her, Marie's, absence; even in their absence, Marie and the young girl Annie, of whom he was also proud, informing Richard that she was smart, quiet but smart.

“There's an artist in town,” Herbert Mix said. “That was her parade you saw this morning. She's leaving tonight on the train. We're having a party for her, a celebration before she goes. You're welcome to come, it'll be fun. We're going to burn the puppets. It's something she says she does after every performance.” A pause, then, after this lengthy run of words, to stand before the nutmeat, the true essence of the day.

“Marie will be there, you can meet Marie,” he said. The pleasure of saying her name twice. And were he to say it a third time, the pleasure, the dizziness he felt, would be no less. Richard could see it in Herbert Mix's eyes, could see it in his general posture, could hear it in his voice, could feel it radiating from his mere presence, like a shout.

Goddamn you lucky savage
, Richard thought, and was both saddened and stricken to think that his own road ahead might be as lengthy, improbable, and lonely.

Richard turned and looked back up toward the bluffs east of town, the Castle Gap country, as if waiting. As if she were due back on some certain schedule, and as if at last he understood that the form of the land would, must, deliver her back to him.

“I'd love to meet her,” he told the old treasure seeker. “Where, and what time?”

 

The burning took place out near one of the old well sites. The puppets were arranged around the edge of one of the sinkholes, and a bonfire was already burning when Richard and Herbert Mix arrived, so that at first, from a distance, they thought they were late, and that the puppets were already aflame. They rode out in Herbert Mix's old truck, suffering stiffly but without complaint every jounce and jolt, and in their ride, and in the old man's calming mix of eagerness and peacefulness, his relaxation at moving closer toward the company of his beloved, Richard again felt a twinge of envy: and in the ride out to the party, he understood more about the old bone collector's bliss than he could ever have gleaned from awkward conversation.

The stars burned above them like sparks from the campfire itself; and feeling the cooler air of night rushing in through the open windows, and looking up at the familiar clockwork of constellations, Richard relaxed too, and felt himself for the first time to be in a place more like home: felt the curve of the earth accepting him, as might the flow of some powerful river.

They wound down sandy roads toward the distant fire, the color of it a brighter yellow than the orange flares of the gas wells scattered across the desert. Richard found himself remembering the specifics of each wellhead they passed, the abandoned dry holes as well as the productive, snake-hiss pumping oil wells and the silent hydrant-like wellheads of the gas producers. He remembered being out on the well-logging trucks at each location they passed, midwifing each well into existence, the life or death of the well to be decided by each logging job, and by his interpretation of the data.

He found himself remembering with remarkable intensity the squiggly lines of electrocardiograph-like responses of the logging tool on the computer's screen as the radioactive tool was lowered and then raised slowly back up through the geological column of the just-drilled hole: little blebs and nips of electrical response revealing hidden ledges and beaches and old creeks and canyons thousands of feet below; hidden oil and gas, the treasure, and lenses of water, sometimes salty (Devonian) and other times fresh (Pennsylvanian), always the enemy, always indicating failure.

And in the remembering of so many tiny geological details—the intimacy of specific sand grains from various core samples, the sand from long ago held in his bare hands and rubbed between his fingers to gauge grain size and hence perhaps porosity, and sniffed for traces of hydrocarbons, and even tasted with his tongue to determine the presence of silt or clay—he remembered also the often-nameless well operators and drillers and roughnecks who had been out on the rigs helping him deliver each of those wells.

He remembered the taste of 4:00 a.m. scorched coffee—always, it seemed the wells were delivered at night, gave up their secrets at night—and the odor of the workers' harsh cigarettes mixing with the even more astringent eye-stinging odor of the ammonia that was used to make the blue-line prints of the electrical logs, so that Richard could spread them out on the little table inside the logging van as if they were the thing itself, rather than a representation.

And with his calculator and various formulas, he had begun his computations that would help decide where into the subsurface world he had fallen, and what was to be done about it: whether to push on, drilling deeper, or to turn back, and walk away.

It was like the dreamworld, the otherworld, that Herbert Mix was in right now, as they headed farther out into the desert, as leisurely in their night drive as a pleasure boat chugging out of a harbor, with all of a grand day's trip lying ahead. It was similar, that deliciously imagined underworld, but it was not quite as good. It was but a substitute for the world above, and Richard, riding out to the bonfire and the burning of the puppets, felt as if he was perched on some ledge midway between the two worlds, the higher and the lower, and yet that he had no route, no path, to take him from the one to the other; that after thirty-three years, he was finally stranded.

And realizing this, he tried not to panic, but leaned back in the seat of old Herbert Mix's ancient truck, and tried to let the shape of the land and the force of time deliver him to where he needed to be.

He knew Clarissa would not be at this party, he acknowledged his fear that he might never see her again, and yet he found the courage to continue to hope that he might somehow again; and from behind the steering wheel, old Herbert Mix hummed quietly, both hands on the wheel, with the bonfire growing finally closer.

 

The little handful of puppet-children and their parents were already gathered, roasting hot dogs and marshmallows over the fire—half a dozen cars and trucks were parked around the throw of light—and perhaps Richard might have recognized the girl as his own immediately, had he spied her out on her own, separate from the small crowd.

As it was, when he first viewed her, she was surrounded by others, in the midst of three generations of girls and women, standing with one of her classmates, her closest friend, a quiet, younger girl named Maeve, and Beth, the puppeteer, barely twenty, and Ruth, almost thirty, and then Marie, whose silver hair shone in the firelight, and whom Richard intuited immediately was Herbert Mix's paramour.

They went straight away toward the assembled group and were handed paper cups of warm apple cider, which Beth acknowledged was an old pagan-Yankee tradition of hers, one that was necessary to accompany any and all of her puppet-burnings. She made it sound as if she had been doing it all her life, and when Richard asked when she had gotten started, she told him that she had been making them and playing with them for as long as she could remember, but that her first professional job had not come until she was thirteen.