All the Land to Hold Us (23 page)

The men shut off their trucks and got out and began unhitching the chains and harnesses before reassembling them into one longer line, which they would keep attached to the elephant so that they could reel it back in, once it was sufficiently cooled and watered.

As if they each and all believed the elephant, if it recovered, would still be capable of making the next evening's show.

Upstream, they fastened their trucks together with remnants of chain, forming one solid deadweight that they felt confident not even the elephant's bulk, nor the current of Horsehead Crossing, could displace. For extra security they had the boys fill the backs of the trucks with sand. Then they set about building a sand bunker between the trucks and elephant, as a kind of firewall between man and nature, beast and machine.

Max Omo burned the elephant's flank a fourth time, and a fifth, though to no avail; the elephant sat perched on the ledge like some great roosting bird. Each brand smoldered anew, and though the pattern, the inscription, was always the same, the cant of each brand was always different, and the brandings soon began to overlay one another, so that they began to appear as crowded hieroglyphs, meaningless.

The elephant's eyes widened each time the firebrand drew nearer, and tears leaked from those glassine eyes with each clench of steam—the elephant's body miraculous in that it was still capable of producing any moisture at all—and with each branding, the same shudder rippled through all the thousands of pounds of life. And though thus attentive to the brandings, the elephant still disdained the river below, determined to settle in.

They tried shoving against the wall of the elephant, pushing so hard against the cottonwood lever-spars that the timbers snapped with the sound of cannon fire—and finally they gave up and set to work on the bankside, digging and clawing with boards and shovels and bare hands at the pale cliff wall beneath the star-backed silhouette of the creature.

As they worked, kingfishers that had been roosting in the nests and crevices and burrows of their making flew from their hollows in the earth as if from some magician's trick, or as if excavated and released by the frantic labor of the searchers.

For two hours, the crew worked beneath the towering, silent elephant, kneeling beneath it as if praying for absolution; or as if attempting, perhaps, to prevent the elephant from falling, rather than encouraging it to fall; for seen from any distance at all, their exertions would have been indistinguishable from any one goal to another.

Mufti was the only one among them who was thinking clearly; he was the only one who had not joined in the digging, and stood instead up on the bluff, tending to the elephant: speaking to it, scratching its ears.

Most of the others—Marie, and, amazingly, even Max Omo—were beginning to have the first flickers of self-doubt, despite their work: as if, in their furious burrowing, they were tunneling closer to some lucid, surprising truth, and that it was a truth they did not want to discover, and yet neither could they stop digging.

Because the ledge was not stone, there was no telltale buckling or fracturing to tell the miners below and the riders above when the shelf would suddenly give free, delivering them all into the river.

There would be only the briefest, hastened hourglass-trickling of sand pouring down upon the necks and backs of the workers below, and there would not be time to ponder or consider the meaning of this. There would be barely time to leap.

And when the workers below—the houndsmen, the children, and Marie and Max Omo—felt those whisperings of sand, in the moment before collapse, each threw aside his or her shovel and dived to the side just seconds before the world above fell upon them.

In his sorrow, Mufti was curled up on the elephant's back with his arms spread wide as if trying to embrace the animal, or as if riding the elephant in his sleep, at a great rate of speed, so that he had to lower and turn his head against the resistance.

When the ledge broke, crumbling into the excavated void below, it was fortunate for Mufti that he was already properly positioned for such a ride; and in their plummet it seemed to Mufti that he had caused it from his mere will alone: a metamorphosis as astonishing as the transformation from a graven image on a coin—a horse, or a hound—into the living object itself.

They flew past the others, man and rider, passing their comrades with a hushed roaring of sand, then sweeping past the place where the others had been standing only seconds before, sweeping past them as if the laborers had been but ghosts; and the crumbling assemblage collapsed into the rushing, muddy Pecos, which accepted them as readily as if such admixture was the very fuel on which the river ran. As if no other miracles could exist or be sustained without the regular stirring-in of additions, willing or unwilling, such as Mufti and the elephant.

The elephant's legs, summoned and working now from a place even deeper than where the pain of the firebrand had been able to reach, churned frantically, and like a gray boulder being transported by unimaginable force, the elephant spun and whirled, looking not so much imperiled but like some wild teacup ride in a children's amusement park, and Mufti clung to the animal's ear.

Had the river gotten wilder in all the years intervening since the cattle crossings? The old ranchers said that if anything it had gotten lower and tamer; and watching the elephant bob helplessly in its current, his starlit ivory tusks twirling and rising and falling like driftwood spars, and the trunk writhing upward, desperate for air, twisting like some great serpent that came up from the river's depths only once every century or so, Max Omo wondered how any of the cattle had ever made it across.

He tried to reconcile in his mind the vision of ten thousand cattle churning and lunging broadside to the current, a plait of flesh contesting the river's many electrical currents, each sheathed in its own pulse, while above that subaqueous song, little different from the baying of the hounds, the frantic legs of forty thousand hoofs gnashed at the water, surging for the other side: the mass of their cumulative desire so great that they often formed a temporary bridge, a living dam that the water still breached, but which raised the shuddering water upstream by a height of several feet.

The elephant continued downstream, spinning, tipping, and bobbing, with Mufti still hanging on (in his desperation he had seized the elephant's ear with his teeth, and with his eyes shut against the whirling, had committed fully to traveling wherever the elephant went—to be saved or lost, according to the fortunes and talents of the elephant), and Max Omo and Marie and the houndsmen ran alongside the river above them, stumbling across the sand; the houndsmen running for their claim, watching their tenuous chance for riches be pulled farther away from them, and unable, in the enormity of the moment, to let it go as only the cost of a lost day's wages, an education, and a spectacle.

The boys ran along the river like hounds, and Max Omo ran without knowing why. Marie ran alongside as well, with the hopes of somehow being able to rescue Mufti, or to provide consolation to him in his vanishing: and as she ran she entertained still, and despite her exhaustion, thoughts of somehow trying to rescue, or at least comfort, the elephant.

But their quarry spun farther away, as if unmindful of the desires that pursued him, and was whisked onward by some speed and power far greater than the hungers of the pursuers and the pursued.

Quickly, then, the elephant and Mufti disappeared into the darkness, and the followers ceased their pursuit; and in ceasing—strung out and straggled up and down the high banks of the river—each felt the release of a torment that none had realized they even possessed.

Even the boys felt the new peace, and stood there huffing, sweating, listening to the river.

Marie knelt in the sand and wept: and whether for Mufti, the elephant, or herself, she could not say, nor could she have identified the tears as being those of sorrow or release.

She cried a while longer—Max Omo and the boys stood rigid, mortified by this sprawl of rampant femininity—and the houndsmen looked away, slightly embarrassed but feeling sorrowful in their own manner over the loss of their money.

Without a word to the houndsmen, Max Omo turned and went back to his truck, heading home to work. His boys followed close behind him, and farther back, like a sleepwalker, Marie.

She noticed that Max Omo was walking gingerly, almost lightly across the sand—as if seeking to avoid being detected by someone, or something; and it was some moments before she realized, through the downward tilt of his jaw, and the whipped cant of his tense and stiffened shoulders, that that thing whose notice he sought to elude was failure.

For days afterward, and then weeks, Max Omo would feel stuck in place, mired in some awful morass of weakness and unoriginality, days in which the most mundane problems would appear before him, and where once before he would have evaluated them almost seamlessly, it seemed now that his rhythms had vanished, as well as his energy and interest.

A generator would not start, or would be firing on only one spark plug, or his diesel fuel would get some salt water mixed in with it, and he would stand flummoxed, motionless, on the verge of weeping. His strength seemed to be all unwound from within, and though he wanted to blame it on the elephant, he knew that the weakness, the rottenness, had to come only from within; that he had only himself to blame, for hauling off across the sands after that damn elephant; for having drawn too close to another's dream, rather than fashioning and pursuing his own, however dull and tame and uninspiring his own might have been.

The dream of rising daily and grappling with the salt in the muscular combat of steady immersion. The dream of unwakefulness. He had been gluttonous, had traveled too far beyond his world, and he knew it; and now his body and his mind were like aliens to him, and he could not seem to find his way back.

He began to stand at the edge of the lake for long periods of time, particularly in the evenings, just staring: a man who had never before wasted time or energy on dreams now plagued by them, with the notion or concept of failure a shadow or possibility now over everything he did or looked at or even considered.

 

In the river, options were more limited. There certainly could be no steering of the elephant, and as Mufti clung to the animal's back, it seemed to him that they were not so much being swept downstream laterally, but that their flight, their falling, was vertical, as when in a dream the dreamer shuts his eyes and lets go entirely.

It seemed to Mufti that he had become the elephant: or that he had always been the elephant, and only now, in the center of the stripping current, and pummeled by stones and logs, was that old mask or outer layer being pulled away, scouring clean the disguise of the man to reveal instead the essence, the elephant.

As Mufti rode—the elephant jarring against spars and jams, colliding and careening—there were nonetheless long rushing stretches in which they floated without striking anything; and in those unencumbered runs, with the elephant's thick legs churning silently under water, it felt to Mufti as if the elephant was dancing.

Sometimes Mufti could hear the clatter and rumble of rocks tumbling along the river bottom beneath them, their movements muted by the blanket of river. Was it worse to watch the stars, or the rushing dark river? Mufti imagined that he could see pulses of electricity beneath them, and it seemed too that on his journey he was passing through zones and pockets of sentience, if not full intelligence, and thinking, living processes: not his own sentience, but the river's.

From time to time, in certain sections of the river, he would find himself passing through waves of communication so strong that after he had swept through and past them, he would turn his head and stare back at the place he had just passed through, as if hoping to continue receiving the communication; but there was never a second refrain, only the once-calling: and then, farther down the river, he would pass through another place in which it seemed the river was more alive.

On they rode, with the night melting now back into the living red heat of the dawn that would have destroyed the elephant, had he remained collapsed in the sand; though even in the river, Mufti noticed, the elephant was riding lower: yet still, the legs kept churning.

Mufti leaned in close to the elephant and whispered encouragement to it, and marveled at the animal's power, and celebrated for so long having been associated with such an animal.

He knew it went against that which he had previously believed in, but he leaned in even closer (the waves had flattened out to mere swells, and the elephant was bobbing along almost effortlessly now, even if it did appear to be sinking lower with each passing mile) and whispered, for the first time in over twenty years, the elephant's name: “Tsavo.”

He did not believe it was the end of the line for the elephant, nor did he believe that his own time was drawing near; instead, he wanted only to call the elephant's name out of respect and overwhelming gratitude, and out of mortification and apology, too, as he realized sharply that despite all the tricks and stunts he had trained the elephant to do across the years, it should have been the other way around, with the elephant the trainer, and Mufti the student.

“Tsavo,” he whispered again, and as if Mufti had somehow driven a lance between the elephant's ribs, the elephant dropped perceptibly lower in the water, even though the current was no longer troublesome, but was instead mild and consistent, like a winding brook such as two young people might paddle upon in a canoe on a Sunday afternoon, out on a picnic, with a hamper of cheese and wine in the bow.

The sun was riding higher. Only a broad oval of the dry center of the elephant's back, and his head, sunk nearly to eye level, remained above the surface now; and though the current was easier now, the elephant was laboring harder.

Now the elephant's eyes were below the water. Could it still see? Mufti wondered. Was it observing wondrous wrecks of the past, the spars of old wagons, or even the ribs of its ancestors, the mastodons, embedded as fossils in the underwater cliffs?