All the Land to Hold Us (33 page)

On through the third day the arriving partygoers kept wandering around behind the bunkhouse to inspect the grotesquerie, the monstrosity, of their dinner, as Tomás kept watering the fish.

At dusk, with the fish's gasps coming more slowly than ever, and with the silver stream of water no longer seeming to bring him any relief—with every gulp of air a rasp of sandpaper against the fish's gills, and no oxygen transfer to be gotten at all from that transaction—the tarantulas came out again, regular as clockwork.

The guests were sitting out in lawn chairs by the airstrip, drinking and watching the sunset, and Tomás heard the women shriek and the men hoot drunkenly as the arachnids revealed themselves, walking with delicate high-step deliberation—as if the remnant warmth of the airstrip was something to be savored, and as if each step, and each moment, was a calculation of utmost deliberation.

The cooks lit propane lanterns and set them up and down the airstrip, to guide any night-arriving flights, and lit candles and placed them on all of the picnic tables. Moths rose from out of the desert, swirling like a sandstorm, or like the ghosts and spirits of the grille-splattered grasshoppers reanimated. The moths swarmed those lanterns, burning their wings and falling crippled and smoking to the ground, half-cooked already, where the tarantulas found them, hunted them down, and began consuming them.

The cooks came and placed lanterns around Tomás and the fish, as well, and told him that his work was done, that he could stop watering the fish, though he only shook his head and told them that he would continue until the very last moment; and Sy Craven, who had come outside to view the fish, looked down at the boy and smiled at his grit and fury and focus, and thought how he would like to pluck this boy, too, wondered how he would like China, and pulled a hundred-dollar bill from his money clip and handed it to him; and Tomás took it, thanked him gratefully and enthusiastically, and folded it carefully with one hand into his shirt pocket: though still, he kept watering.

There were lanterns gathered around Tomás and the fish now like candelabras at a dinner setting. Tomás wished for the fish to die before the men began skinning him, but realized also that that was a child's wish, not a man's, and he would soon step away from and outgrow such trivialities as kindness or compassion for such irrelevances as a gritty, dying fish.

Moths cartwheeled off the lantern and landed charred and fuzz-singed upon the fish's glistening back, where they stuck to his sticky skin like feathers, their wings still flapping.

Someone accused Tomás of wasting water, and finally he rose and turned the hose off; and immediately, or so it seemed to Tomás, a fine wrinkling appeared on the previously taut gunmetal skin of the fish: a desiccation, like watching a time-lapse motion picture of a man's or woman's skin wrinkling as he or she ages.

The thin summer breeze, and the heat from the lanterns, seemed to be sucking the moisture from the skin already. It seemed to Tomás that the fish's eyes searched for, then found, his. What was it like for the fish, Tomás wondered, straddling the land now between the living and the nonliving?

George Waller stepped up and pulled out a hunting knife. It was his fish to kill. He would not be the one to cook it, but it was important to him, Tomás and the others saw, to lay claim to it, and to remind everyone that he was the one who had caught it.

He made the first cut lightly around the neck with the long blade as if opening an envelope. He slid the knife in lengthwise beneath the skin and then ran an incision down the spine all the way to the tail, five feet distant. The fish stopped gasping for a moment, opened its giant mouth in shock and outrage, then began to gasp louder.

In watering the fish all day, and into the evening, Tomás had not noticed how many men and women had been gathering. Now that he was standing he saw that there were dozens of them, and he wondered if the fish could feed them all. He saw Richard, who had just returned from the field, and, though he did not know him, scowled at him, disapproving that a man so young and still possessing the capability for fuller freedom should place himself in such company.

“Someone put that fish out of its misery,” a woman said, and a man stepped from out of the crowd with a pistol, aimed at the fish's broad head, and fired—the noise was tremendous—and people yelled and screamed.

“Cut that shit out!” Red Watkins yelled, stepping toward the man with the gun, who retreated back into the crowd, grumbling an apology, then raised a bottle to his lips.

The bullet had made a dark hole in the fish's head. The wound didn't bleed and, like some mythic monster, the fish did not seem affected by it. It kept on breathing, and Tomás wanted very much to begin watering it again.

George Waller, with the knife, kept cutting. When he had all the cuts made, two other men helped him lift the fish. They ran a rope through its cavernous mouth and out its gills and hoisted it up into a mesquite tree, where roosting birds rustled, then flew out of the branches and into the night.

The fish writhed, sucking for air, finding none, but was somehow from far within able to summon and deliver enough power to flap its tail once, slapping one of the men in the ribs with a
thwack
that sounded like a woman beating a wet rug with a baseball bat, and the man, who was drunk, was knocked down. His glass spilled and then broke when it landed.

“Give me that gun,” he shouted when he got up, and he took the gun from the man who'd fired it earlier and stepped up and put another bullet in the fish's broad head, so that now a second, balanced, nostril appeared; and still the fish seemed unfazed.

Red Watkins intervened once more, grabbed the gun from the drunk man, knocked the man down yet again, then threw the gun out into the desert. Tomás's eyes followed the arc of the gun beyond the candlelight into darkness, and he resolved, after the party had ended and the partygoers were lying comatose and tangled amongst one another, to go and search for, and claim, that pistol.

Another man passed through the crowd, pouring tequila from a bottle. Red Watkins's knuckles were bleeding from where he had hit the man, who was still lying on the ground, not moving. The fish was making guttural sounds, and George Waller said, “Well, I guess it's time to cook him.” He found a pair of pliers in the toolshed and came back out and gripped the skin with the pliers up behind the fish's neck and then peeled the skin back, skinning the fish alive in that manner as if pulling the husk or wrapper from a thing to reveal that which had been hidden within.

The fish flapped and struggled and twisted, swinging wildly on the rope and croaking, but there was no relief to be found. The croaking was loud and bothersome and so the men lowered the fish, carried it over to the picnic table beside the fire, and began sawing the head off. When they had that done, the two pieces—head and torso—were still moving, though with less vigor—the fish's body writhing very slowly on the table, and the mouth of the fish's head opening and closing just as slowly, and still the fish kept croaking, though more quietly now, as if perhaps it had gotten something it had been asking for and was now somewhat appeased.

The teeth of the saw were flecked with bone and fish-muscle, gummed with cartilage and gray brain. “Here,” said Waller, handing Tomás the saw, “go down to the mud pit and wash that off.” He looked at the gasping head (the rope was still passed through the mouth and gills) and said, “Take this down there, too, and feed it to the turtles—make it stop making that noise”—and some of the men and women laughed.

He handed Tomás the rope with the heavy croaking head attached to it, and Tomás took it and turned and went down into the darkness toward the shining round mud pit—the full moon was reflected in it like an eye—and as he walked, there was silence down by the mud pit, except for the dull croaking coming from the package he carried at the end of the rope: carrying it almost like a basket or a purse. He could hear the sounds of the party up on the hill, but down by the mud pit, with the moon's gold eye cold upon it, there was silence, save for the deep-purring fish head.

Tomás lowered the fish head into the warm water and watched as it sank down below the moon. It was still croaking, and the gasping made a stream of bubbles that trailed up to the surface as it sank, and for a little while, even after it was gone, it seemed he could still hear the raspy croaking—duller, now, and much fainter—coming from beneath the water; and like a child, he held the brief thought or hope that maybe the fish was relieved now; that maybe the water felt good on its gills and on what was left of its body.

He set about washing the saw. Bits of flesh floated off the blade and across the top of the water. After he had the blade cleaned, he sat and listened for the croaking, but could hear nothing, and was relieved. (In later years, Tomás would have the occasional dreams that the great fish had survived; that it had regenerated a new body to match the giant head, and that it still lurked in that pond, savage, betrayed, wounded.)

He sat there quietly and soon enough the crickets became accustomed to his presence and began chirping again, and a peace filled back in over the scuzzy pond, and over the night, like a scar healing, or like grass growing bright and green across a charred landscape. Out in the desert, chuck-will's-widows began calling once more, and Tomás sat there and listened to the sounds of the party up on the hill. Someone had brought fiddles and they were beginning to play, and it was a sweet sound, in no way in accordance with the earlier events of the evening.

Tomás could smell the odor of meat cooking and knew the giant fish had been laid to rest atop the coals.

The light from the lanterns on the hill was making a gold dome of light in the darkness—to Tomás it looked like an umbrella—and after a while he turned and went back up to the light and to the noise of the party.

In gutting and cleaning the fish before skewering it on an iron rod to roast, the cooks had cut open its stomach to see what it had been eating. They found a small gold pocket watch, fairly well preserved, though with the engraving worn away so that all they could see on the inside face was the year,
1898
. It was decided that in honor of his having the barbecue, George Waller should receive the treasure from the fish's stomach. (There was also a can opener, a couple of handfuls of pesos and centavos, a slimy tennis shoe, some bailing wire, and a large soft-shelled turtle, still alive, which clambered out of its leathery entrapment and with webbed feet, long claws, and frantically outstretched neck scuttled its way blindly down toward the mud pit—knowing instinctively where water and safety lay, and where, Tomás supposed, it later found the catfish's bulky head and began feasting on it.)

In subsequent days Red Watkins would take the watch apart—George Waller wanted nothing to do with it—and clean it piece by piece and then spend the better part of a month, in the hot middle part of the day, as he babysat all the various rigs and their crews, reassembling the watch, after drying the individual pieces in that bright September light.

That night at the party, one woman stood out from the rest. She was dressed like a flapper, and she went up to where the fish skin was hanging from a nail on a mesquite tree, still wet and shiny. She turned her back to the bonfire that was burning, lowered her dress to her waist, and slipped into the fish skin, wrapping it tightly around her like a vest, then turned to face the crowd, and started to dance in front of the fire, and in front of the partygoers.

The fiddles slowly stopped playing, one by one, so that the only sound was the crackling of the fire, and Tomás could see the woman doing her fish dance, with her arms clasped together over her head, and dust plumes rising from her shuffling feet, and then people were edging in front of him, a wall of people, so that he could not see.

More plumes of dust came hurrying down the road, cars traveling toward the party as if knowing that the fish lady was dancing, and hurrying to see her; while beyond, in the desert landscape stretching to the blue mountains and then up into the mountains, they could see the flares of the gas wells venting fifty- and sixty-foot plumes of flame into the night sky. The natural gas was rarely worth selling, was cheaper to waste than to utilize, its removal necessary to get to the sweet dark oil below.

A hundred, then two hundred, then three hundred such flares were visible, delineating the developing ghost-shape of the giant oilfield below, the columns of flame appearing perhaps like the burning bars of a cage to the partygoers, or, to those passing over in a plane, the shape or outline of a great dragon or sea monster below, or even an immense fish.

 

Tomás left the encampment after a solitary breakfast the next morning, the cooks and he the only ones awake at the bright hour of nine o'clock. Richard, who had not participated in the evening's revelry, had already gone back out into the field, and Tomás, with the prize of the fish-killing pistol hidden in his ancient canvas rucksack, was paid an extra twenty dollars for washing the cars and planes.

He had worked through the night, catnapping amidst the sounds of the party—he had awakened at dawn to the sight of the tarantulas creeping past and around the scattered bodies of several of the partygoers, who lay felled like soldiers defending a homeland or a cherished cause, rather than simple victims of folly and ill-considered choice—and as he was leaving, Sy Craven came out and thanked him, asked for his full name so that he might contact him at some point in the future about other work, and then Tomás left, declining Sy Craven's offer to have one of the pilots fly him back to his hometown, twenty miles distant.

Instead he set off on foot. By noon, he was back to the upper reaches of the Madeira, where he lay down in the tall autumn-dry grass beside the river in the cool shade of a sycamore and napped for two hours, listening to the sound of the river running like blood, and the yellow grass rustling.