All the Land to Hold Us (3 page)

Clarissa rarely slept, there on the air mattress. She would lie awake watching the stars while Richard slept, and she would wait. When she swam she kept her hair up in a bun, to keep the salt in the river from damaging it, and only the hair at the nape of her neck would get damp.

On the riverbank, she would lie very still, conscious of the need to conserve herself—her energy, and her passions—sensing that if she was to escape Odessa successfully and forever, she would have to do so, despite her great beauty, by somehow staying beneath the world's, or time's, notice. To wait, and wait, until a gate or door opened.

She did not even know what the door looked like, nor certainly to where it led: only that it had not yet opened, and she felt the need to wait, as if sleeping.

 

Richard would awaken shortly after dawn, on those mornings when they were able to spend the night out along the river—when his work did not call him back to the oilfields that next day, for one rare reason or another—and Clarissa would already be sitting up, just watching him, a sheet drawn around her shoulders, as if even the first pink light of day might somehow be able to burn her fair skin.

He would feel himself being studied, and would rise and embrace her. They would make love on the sand, the sheet over his back above her for protection against the sun, like a billowing tent—the day's dry breezes already beginning—and then he would make a driftwood cookfire, and would catch and fry a catfish for his breakfast, and make eggs and bacon for hers.

She would eat nothing that came from so wild and rank a place as the river, though she enjoyed with a perfect mix of distaste and longing watching him hunker naked by the fire, cock hanging down to the sand, spiny gutted catfish dipped in batter and leaning out over the skillet head and tail, Richard using a sock as a hot pad for the iron skillet, so that in that first pale light, pink turning already to copper, the scene could have been from a hundred or two hundred years ago, a nomadic Comanche or Apache.

After breakfast, Clarissa would paint her body completely with zinc oxide, as would Richard, and they would go walking in the desert, naked save for their sandals, hats, and sunglasses.

This was the most dangerous thing she did; the most dangerous thing she would ever do. She could feel the heat trying to burn through the crust of her white shell. She carried the tube of zinc with her and stopped to reapply it whenever a trickle of sweat revealed even the thinnest trace of flesh, and Richard carried a canteen on a strap slung over his shoulder.

On they marched, like ghosts reanimated, following the sensual hills of the dunes, searching for nothing, only wandering; and knowing that if they got lost, or ran out of water, they would die, and die horribly.

In the dazzling heat and blowtorch winds, their zinc coatings baked and continuously cracked and fell off in patches, so that they kept having to stop and mend each other's gaps, as if repairing chinks in armor. Sand and grit and even husks of insect shells and stray feathers and the fur of jackrabbits and the occasional wind-tossed glittering scales of skeletal fish and reptiles would become affixed to the sweating sludge of their whitened, protective coating, so that it might have seemed that they themselves were evolving, and at a pace approaching light-speed, into some melded, awkward admixture of landscape: a crude experiment, and reeling, lost, frantic.

None of these emotions were in them, however, when they were in the dunes. They took their time, gave themselves over to following the curious, shifting slopes as they might follow behind a herd of circus elephants, or camels, or some other odd and extravagant grouping; and they did not panic.

Occasionally they would happen upon the little temporary oases, the just-appeared ponds of wind-rippled, sparkling water, once again attended to by birds, and sometimes by coyotes and kit foxes; and again, they would crouch on their hands and knees at water's edge, or hunker, and drink from the lens of water like wild animals (the colorful birds swirling overhead), or they would drink with cupped hands, would let the cold water run down their arms, and would sprinkle the water on the backs of each other's necks and faces: and then, reapplying even more zinc oxide, they would turn back, heading for the wide salty vein of the Pecos.

And once back in their camp, they would bathe in that salty river. They would dress in cool long-sleeved shirts and light cotton pants and drive back to Odessa, feeling free and glorious to be shed of the old fur-and-grit paste-skin that had become like a part of themselves; and on the drive back, bleary-eyed, they would drink a gallon of fresh water, drinking straight from a plastic jug.

Once back in town, Clarissa would sleep for the rest of the day and that night, and almost all of the next day as well, so drained would she be from the sojourn and its strange challenges; and it would not be until the next day that she would use her parents' car to take the fossils she had collected all the way to Austin, a five-hour drive each way, to sell to a museum there, lying about the provenance of the discovery, saying only that she had found them in cardboard boxes upon cleaning out the estate of her grandfather.

She would put the money in an Austin bank. She wasn't sure how much she would need to go to wherever she was going, nor when or where that would be. In her first two months with Richard she had made almost $10,000, collecting and selling fossils, but she did not think that would be nearly enough. It would have helped to know where she wanted to go or what she wanted to do, but the door simply had not opened.

She was certain that it would. It never occurred to her that it might not. And there was never a gathering of people—an office party in Odessa, a routine shopping trip, a Sunday morning in church—when, if a real door opened, her eyes did not turn to that door, to see who or what might be entering.

 

There was another collector in the region, a Mr. Herbert Mix, an elderly man who had lost a leg to diabetes and who had once been enraptured with the search for the various caches of gold.

Before his leg had been taken, Mix had evidenced a hunger not only for the gold itself, nor its legends and lores, but for everything else that might have been peripherally associated with it. Any trace of iron or steel he happened across in his diggings, or any other human artifact, he was compelled to save. He had begun searching for the treasure when he was seven; he was now seventy-four, and had lost his leg only ten years before. Over the years he had established a substantial hoard, one that filled numerous adobe huts in town.

Old horseshoes, knife blades, wagon wheels, clay pots, human skeletons: anything was fair game, his hunger was nondirectional and unquenchable, and he hauled it all home, affixed an index card to each item stating the date and location of when and where it had been found, along with a brief narration of what Mix perceived to have been the circumstances of its deposition.

Always lurid, his descriptions confirmed without fail his suspicions that there had never been an arrowhead that had not pierced human flesh, nor any skeleton that had perished under any circumstance save for a massacre or a sun-maddened wandering. The most intricate trinkets—a single rusted link of chain—were physical proof of the Emperor Maximilian's exiled wanderings.
Here
, he had camped for the night, with only half a day's lead on his pursuers, who intended to bring him back to Mexico to execute him for, among other things, having failed their expectations;
here
, this shard of pottery, was where Coronado sat with the chief of the Zuñis and informed him that the Zuñis were now subjects of the nation of Spain.
Here
, this fragment, was where the chief rose to his feet, broke the clay dish over his knee, and stalked off, vowing to make war upon the white man “until the ocean turned to stone again.”
This
tattered songbook, this hymnal, could only have belonged to the wife of the first pastor in the county, the pastor who had received the deathbed confessions of so many, and who, in turn, prior to breathing his last, murmured more treasure clues, scrambled, to his wife . . .

It was all there, in little dusty earthen-floored storage sheds out back off the main streets of Odessa, the blood-and-guts matrix of his dreams, as well as the dreams of so many others; and, enthusiastically quantified and cataloged, it was for him as irrefutable as any history book.

Mix opened a museum that showcased the trappings and residues of the treasures, if not the treasures themselves. He catered to the lonely and the unfulfilled; and in addition, to the long tables of mementos he kept on display in an abandoned garage—charging fifty cents per head to walk in and take refuge from the heat of the day (the eternal wind slinging sand against the curved metal roof of the garage, which had the shape and cavernous sounds of an airplane hangar), and charging a dollar for those who wanted to touch.

Horseshoes, square nails, old coffee cans, and other refuse from the hundreds of searchers earlier in the century: nothing was sacred, and though Mix was unwilling to part with any of the hundreds of human skulls he'd accumulated over the decades, he was not above selling various lesser body parts—a vertebra, a phalange, or even a pelvic bone—to a motivated buyer.

In the yard behind his house, amongst the weeds, were enough rusting and rotting wagon-train wheels to supply three cavalries across five centuries. It had long been said that a person could not safely ride a horse through the dunes, because one of the horse's hoofs would sooner or later snag on one of the thousands of abandoned wagon wheels; and until about the 1930s and '40s, until Herbert Mix's insatiable appetite had been unleashed fully upon the landscape, that had been true.

In addition to selling wagon wheels to decorate the front-gate entrances of ranches and ranchettes, he sold pickaxes and canteens, tents and army cots, to would-be searchers; and he had his own maps for sale too, diagrams of the position and orientation of what he perceived to be some of the more significant of his discoveries: and from those orientations he had offered interpretations.

He rented these maps out to novice prospectors for hard cash as well as a contractual agreement that stipulated a fifty-fifty split of any bounty that was found. And though Mix could rarely any longer get into the mountains, he offered himself as a consultant, and for a fee could be persuaded to haul himself up onto a midget burro and, beneath a pink or purple parasol gotten for $1.99 at the department store, head laboriously up into the mountains or out into the desert with one of a new generation of seekers, sipping whiskey and pointing out places to dig, while ruminating upon and interpreting each spadeful of dirt.

Across the span of over half a century of his disease, he made a lot of money; not as much, perhaps, as he might have been able to produce from the liquidation of a single strongbox of bullion, but enough—more than enough, had he lived prudently, conservatively, moderately. And in a cautious, considered manner, he might have been able to summon, across time, some approximate and perhaps satisfactory semblance of the wealth not from any discovery of the treasure itself, but simply from the sustained dream of it.

He failed in prudence, however. He was unable to restrain his appetite, nor the terrifying euphoria he would sometimes feel, midmeal, when he first realized that, despite prodigious consumption, enough would never be enough.

And so he had not only sold, he had bought. His goal was to sell the unworthy, the duplicated, and the common; but because it all had value in his eyes, he was rarely able to refrain from purchasing the dregs of memorabilia that came sweeping through his museum, brought there by fellow treasure seekers like the cracked and salt-corroded leavings of some reverse tide, running always counter to his own.

No sooner had he closed a sale on a pickax, or a time-pitted cannonball, than some wayfaring derelict would come in with yet another skull, or a sun-mottled medicine vial, or a bird-point arrowhead with the cedar arrow-shaft still attached, wanting to trade it for whiskey money. He had once bought a saber for four hundred dollars; a conquistador's helmet for seven hundred. A rust-gutted six-shooter for a hundred dollars; an odd-shaped stone with an etching on it—perhaps authentic, perhaps not—for two hundred. Even tattered articles of clothing—a faded straw hat, a pair of sand-blown chaps stiff as the sun-dried hide of some bone-bleached steer; a salt-crusted boot—were not beyond his desire.

He spent what he had, for the tide was always coming in.

Always, the skulls were what intrigued him the most. In the early days of his obsession, he had been enamored with the entire skeletal carriage; but as he aged, and then even more so as he shed one of his own legs, it became only the skulls that held interest for him: and of those skulls, his favorite part was the upper; the smooth, boulder-rounded curve of sutured cranium, repository of an infinity of gone-by senses, of sparkling cells of memory now dried to dust and blown forgotten back into the world, leaving behind only the curious whorls of geometry, the empty skull as smooth and lifeless as the inner sweep of a wave-polished, long-vacant conch shell or some other calcified vessel, like the specimens held up to one's ear in childhood in order to hear the echo of the sea's roar.

The other, lesser skeletal parts he kept piled about in his weedy backyard. At first he had attempted to arrange and catalog them, with painted reference numbers corresponding to their detached headpieces, but over the years he abandoned that practice and now merely stacked them into one general boneyard.

Before the physical limitations of his age and his condition had caught up with him, he had rented a great balloon-tired tractor, and with a deep-toothed harrow had combed the troughs between the dunes with the patience of a deep-sea fisherman, keenly attuned beyond the throttled tremblings of the tractor to the dull snag and clink of iron tooth finding rounded bone; and when he felt or sensed such interruption, he would throw the tractor into neutral and hop down and trot out through the warm sand to go gather up his discovery: examining it eagerly, searching for clues to the wounds of battle.