All the Land to Hold Us (2 page)

He would crouch at the water and drink from the little pond like an animal, drinking as much of the ancient water as he could hold, and then he would travel on; and by the next day, the pond would have vanished.

Sometimes, while walking through the dunes, he would see flocks of small colorful birds go flying past—scarlet tanagers, golden warblers, vermilion flycatchers, all flying together—and he would hurry over the dunes, following the direction they had flown. But he had never been able to find water in this manner, and had instead encountered the brief ponds only and always by stumbling chance, like a sleepwalker in a dream awakening to find him- or herself standing ankle-deep in a river.

His company's drilling rigs pushed deeper into the desert, seemingly scattered here and there, but located according to some master plan of the drillers and geologists, who pursued the deepest reservoirs of oil and gas, probing around the edges; seeking the center always, but with their misses defining the rough perimeters.

Every well drilled brought both mystery and knowledge. A dry hole could be as valuable as a producing well, in that it would help define the limits of the field, and would point the geologists in their next direction.

Between wells, and during bit trips and circulations for washouts, Richard continued to hike the reef country above, and the dunes below. Down in the dunes, on three separate occasions he found old wagon wheels. Two appeared to be the remnants of failed crossings—the bent wooden staves that housed the iron rim were still intact, sand-pitted and varnished by both time and the flow of the dunes (as if, just beneath the crests of the dunes, the wagon had still been traveling); but the third wheel was charred: not burned completely, as it might have been had it been damaged and used for firewood, but burned only in a three-quarter arc, which suggested to Richard that the wagon train had been set aflame while still standing upright in the sand: the echo of one of the ritual massacres that took place regularly beneath the notched visage of the Gap.

The landscape gathered all men, across the ages, as the anguished, hungry, confused blood of man surged this way and that, sloshing around in the soft human vessels as if such blood no more belonged in them than a flock of wild birds, bright birds, would belong in a rusting wire cage.

 

During his crumbling reign, Maximilian, the Austrian ex-archduke who served as emperor of Mexico from 1864 to 1867, reportedly sent wagon trains northward with all his family's treasure. Maximilian was eventually placed before a firing squad in the spring of 1867, where, before being blindfolded, he handed each of his executioners a single gold coin; but the rest of his immense wealth had vanished, and the stories surrounding its disappearance, and its eventual burial at Castle Gap, carry at least as much authenticity of detail, and faintly corroborative evidence, as any of the other stories of treasure.

There is always an escapee. The gold is placed in a cave and sealed with a charge of dynamite; Indians thereafter massacre all but one survivor, a Negro slave who eludes capture by submerging in the river and breathing through a straw or reed. He returns to the scene in the night, unearths one of the locked strongboxes, smashes it down on a boulder, and a shower of gold and silver coins cascades onto the ground.

He scoops up a few, caches the strongbox, and heads north, where he is captured, charged with murder, and taken to prison. After seven years of saying he knows where the treasure is, he returns with his jailers, traveling all the way down from Ohio, to show them the cache in exchange for his freedom. When they arrive, however, the cache is gone; and rooting in the dust and gravel, all he is able to produce are a few individual coins, entirely unsatisfactory to his captors, and he is returned to jail.

Or the survivor is a one-hundred-year-old woman who had been but a child on the runaway priests' expedition, the Catholic Cross Cache. In the 1870s, near the end of the old woman's life, she returns by burro to Castle Gap with her two great-grandchildren, one of whom is ten-year-old Susie, who in the 1900s will go on to become Cat-House Susie, an ex-madam servicing oilfield patrons in the region.

According to Cat-House Susie, her great-grandmother left her and her sister playing in camp and rode the burro up to the summit, and then returned, assuring her great-granddaughters that the treasure was still there, that it had not been disturbed.

Or an old barfly, for the price of a drink, will produce a gold nugget and a tattered map, and the story of having been privy to the deathbed conversation of an outlaw or a priest; and the next day, when the treasure seeker goes out to the mountain (sweat already streaming down his back, not so much from the warmth of sunrise as from the heated palpitations within), he will find a veritable minefield of previously dug holes and cairns and freshly blazed trees, and false graves in which, upon being excavated, no bones are to be found—though no treasure either.

The seeker will wander the mountain for a day or two or three, digging in the sun and resting in the heat of noonday in the shamble of the adobe hut at the base of the mountain, the hut that once served as a rest station for the stage.

(It seemed to Richard, when he came to the landscape, that this hut was the only place on the mountain that had not been disturbed by the shovels and pickaxes of man; and if he were going to look for any of the treasure, or treasures, that is where he would have looked. But he didn't. He had come looking for other treasures, other things.)

 

There was one woman in particular with whom he spent time, during the period that he was developing the oilfields in the region. Her name was Clarissa, and she had grown up in Odessa, and hated the oil business—hated the familiarity and sameness of it, as well as the landscape—and though she and Richard were only together for about four months, they were good months, and seemed timeless to the lovers.

Clarissa's hair was as black as a Comanche's, and her eyes were a pale green. She had thick arching eyebrows that could give one who did not know her the impression of perpetual surprise, and flawless, pale skin. Unlike the other girls she had grown up with (whose skin, by the time they were eighteen, already looked like that of forty-year-olds), Clarissa did not endeavor to spend her every sunlit moment in pursuit of bronzing her skin, but labored to keep it the color it was.

She hated the desert, and loved to soak in water for long stretches—in the bathtub, in the salty rivers, even in warm stock tanks—and she and Richard spent many nights just sitting in the shallows, after having loved; and it seemed to him that her pale body, almost luminous when wet, was a phenomenon in such a harsh country—exceedingly rare, and daily imperiled.

Clarissa had no goal other than getting out: away from West Texas and away from the oil business, which meant away from any and all of Texas. When Richard met her she was working in Odessa as a receptionist for one of the drilling companies. She could smell the odor of crude oil on the men who came and went through the office as a farmer or rancher can smell the scent of horses or cattle in another's clothes, or on another's skin; and lying next to Richard, there in the eddies of the salty, muddy river, she could smell it on him, and could taste it on him, though she forgave him, because she in no way loved him, was interested only in the luminescence she sometimes sensed emanating from him. Her own light was hidden, but his seemed at times to leap from him.

There was a place inside him she was drawn to. He would not let her into that place, for she did not love him: but she could sometimes see the glow of it from far within; and for those four months, while he was drilling the various fields, she stayed with him.

The consensus of her high school (she was twenty when Richard met her) and of the community had been that she would go to Hollywood and become an actress or a model. They overestimated her in this regard. She had no desire to work, nor, necessarily, to improve or “better” herself; she wanted only to keep her skin looking the way it did, pale and creamy-soft, night-dreamish, for as long as possible, and to escape the wind and heat.

She sensed intuitively that her power, her physical beauty, lay in this emotional detachment, and ambition of any kind would have jeopardized and perhaps even marred that trance in which the dreamy mental languor was so tied to the physical.

As if everything in her sphere was hypnotized: her viewers, her suitors, the innocence of her skin and beauty, and the ravages of time itself; as if she had momentarily betranced even time's pendulum. So frightened was she of losing her beauty that she lived almost as if in a state of narcolepsy—seeking, as often as possible, not to let the drying winds of the world rest upon her for more than a moment, and moving from one body of water to the next, and bathing, always bathing.

They spent the nights out near Castle Gap, among the reefs and caverns of the bluff, searching for fossils. It was easier to search for them in the daylight, but Clarissa preferred to be out at night, and so they would walk along the rim with flashlights or lanterns, looking for the most perfect and interesting specimens; chipping them out with rock hammers and collecting them in canvas pouches.

Richard kept most of these for his own interest, a personal collection to be placed along his windowsills, while Clarissa saved hers to sell to the museums, to help raise enough money to leave Odessa and make another life as soon as she could.

“This one is over a million years old,” he would tell her, handing her some intricately spiraled snail, “while this one is only about six hundred thousand.” The smell of ancient lime-chalk both fascinated and repelled her—it was the stuff of geology, the stuff of her hometown—and yet neither could she pull away entirely from him, or the fossils.

They worked in the evenings along the old strand lines, and along the fringed edges of ancient reefs, and then deeper—cracking open vertical seams with rock hammer and crowbar, collecting not just the fossils on the surface, but reaching down into the strata of their predecessors.

Even then, and about a thing so meaningless as a mild hobby, he always kept maps, and they found fossils no one had ever seen or described before, and after a while he was able to predict where they might be able to find a certain kind of fossil; and after a while longer—beginning to follow the journey of his dream as if riding on a small raft, feeling the water take it and lift it, feeling the current's center—he was able to predict where they would find certain types of fossils that they had not even seen yet, did not even know existed for sure—hypotheses, musings, based on how a certain sea current, and a certain temperature and water chemistry, might sculpt them: the world shaping them like a potter spinning clay, or a woodworker tending a lathe.

Like a magician, he would sketch the imagined creatures in a notepad—gone-away beings that were fantastically ornamented, bold, and multiantennaed—and then, a few nights later, and several feet farther down into the crevice, they would find those very forms.

The impression such discoveries gave both of them was that the world was infinitely varied, and that the ground upon which they walked was studded with a colossus of change below, vertical columns of magnificent fluted architectures and symphonies that no man or woman had ever seen or heard, dreamed or imagined.

Clarissa's father, in addition to working in oilfield wireline services, was a Baptist preacher who felt that Clarissa's beauty was more a curse than a blessing, and who would have been appalled at her wanton engagement with evolution: prowling the reefs and cliffs with the tusks of cephalopods and bivalves and the ribbed shells of trilobites kept safely in a pouch between her breasts, and Clarissa believing more and more deeply, with each swing of the hammer, in some story larger and grander than the same but simpler version on which he had raised her.

Their work was dirty, climbing among the slot canyons and brushy draws and smashing apart the old lime reefs that were sometimes so riddled with fossils as to seem like the honeycomb of bees. Their bodies would be covered with grit and dust and chalk—newly cracked, freshly broken Cretaceous odors that had not been in the world for several hundred million years—and their arms would be latticed with scratches from where they had reached down into the stony crevices to extract their treasures, as if dissecting the tiniest and most integral gear-works of some huge and calcified machine that had once been the grandest thing on earth.

They camped down along the river, and would swim back across it—Clarissa was not as strong a swimmer, and used a life jacket—and they would bathe in the eddies. They would ride inner tubes through the rapids, making the long run in the horse-drowning current and then walking back up along the shoreline, picking their way around the salt-encrusted skulls of the last century's horses.

Sometimes under the cover of so much darkness it would feel to both of them as if all the sky above had already been transformed into the strata of time—that they were already sealed beneath such a sky, as if below so many trillions of tons of stone—and that at any moment their movements would cease forever and they would be stranded there with the horses' heads, caught ankle- or knee-deep in the mire. Like the children they had been not long ago, they would ride the inner tubes down the moon-bright current, the river bright as magma, again and again, until they were both clean and exhausted, or as clean as they could get, bathing in a salt river.

They would sleep beside the crossing on air mattresses, lulled by the sound of the river. On clear nights, they could hear (and sometimes feel trembling within the earth) the ceaseless throb and clatter of the faraway rigs, as the drillers sought to reach ever deeper, focused on only one thing, and chasing that one thing, the shape of it like the outline of a fleeing animal, hounding it, as if believing like blind converts that that one thing had more significance than any other, and that there was nothing else of comparable worth in the world; or, most blindly of all, that there might truly one day be an end to their searching, and a stanching of their hunger.