All the Land to Hold Us (6 page)

The boys staggered and stumbled and hacked phlegm and spat clumsily. They ran drenched in sweat—the townspeople they passed could smell the fresh salt-odor of them, and could feel the radiant heat from the train of them—and when one of the boys in the harness stumbled before his time was up, the other boys in the harness would snatch him up quickly, before the rest of them tangled legs and they all went down together; and once again, it was as if no hitch had occurred, so that a viewer watching it could not be sure that the stumble had even happened.

Generally they were clumsy, and the training process looked like what it was, work. Sometimes, however, there would be moments in which a purity of glide appeared not just in the pace and movements of one or even two or three of them, but in the whole conjoined body of them, and in which all the previous tension was released from their faces, and there seemed to be no torment or even effort required at all.

On all their faces, in those brief and strange moments, would be expressions of calm rapture; and in some strange shift of realignment, their cleats would all be lifting and falling at the same time, rising and striking not with fourteen hundred and forty patterings, but one sound, and one voice.

In these inexplicable moments, as unpredictable as desert rain, the boys ran like men, or with the grace and power of animals; and in those blissful moments there would be only silence, save for the steady, hungry grind of the steel wheels, and the one steady striking rhythmic slap of all cleats on track and on line, all in the same moment; and if the band were riding with them, its members would fall silent in slightly envious awe—a silence somehow more eloquent than even the most rousing compositions they had yet been able to muster—and both the band and the coaches would simply ride, in that breezy, gliding silence, behind the sweating backs of the harnessed pullers.

So silent was their passage in these moments of grace that to an onlooker glancing out his or her kitchen window, the procession would have seemed utterly soundless, and that the carriage, the stage coach, was traveling with a smoothness of movement that is usually seen only in dreams.

As well, the simple confidence they received from experiencing these moments of fluency gave them a strength in the world, an authority of bearing, that was an added advantage, enabling them to defeat even superior opponents, on the few occasions when such foes were encountered; and to their advantage also was the plain and grueling nature of their training regimen.

And aiding them still further, though sending them also further down the road to ruin, was the twisted love the townspeople lavished upon them.

Many of the locals parceled out not only the thing they called love, but also the physical treasures of the world: bushel baskets of withered fruit and sun-stunted vegetables from their hot, sandy little gardens, and cases of soda pop, and the latest albums, and new clothes, and even money, as well as surprises from whatever foreign or exotic lands any of the boosters might have visited recently. King salmon, gleaming and wolf-toothed, resting on a bed of ice; Japanese silk kimonos and gilded martial arts swords; autographed footballs and baseballs from famous athletes; ivory trinkets from Alaska, loose gemstones from Thailand; and all other manner of the many layers of dross in the world.

The more able-bodied of the town's and team's boosters would be listening for the boys' far-off but thunderous approach, and it was a joy for those fans to be able to run down out to the street with their offerings and, for a few strides, to keep pace with the rushing-past herd of boys.

The boosters would run a short distance farther with the boys, grinning wildly, as if in amongst a herd of wild cattle or mustangs. But then the wagon, the football players as well as the loose herd, the coaches and the band, would be pulling away, and after that short distance each booster, man and woman, would have to slow to a stop, gasping, bent over and huffing, hands on his or her knees; and as they watched the wagon growing smaller and smaller, not like some tide receding or being pulled by the boys but as if drawn away by some larger, hungrier force, with the boosters' donations piled high on the sides of the wagon, those left behind could sense further that their lives were draining away: and as if some wild little spark burned stubborn within them even still, they would begin already, in that moment of loneliness and failure, to consider what gifts and offerings they might be able to bestow for the next morning's run, and the next; and for most of them, no matter what deals they closed later that day, or what transactions occurred, that brief morning's chase would be the highlight of their day.

For those of them who were too old or infirm to run briefly alongside the wagon—for those who might totter out in front of it and be crushed—they would place their contributions on the sidewalks, and the street corners, on the night before; or, worried that coyotes and stray dogs would wander into town and carry away the perishable items, they would wait until that first gray light of dawn to hurry out with their streetside emplacements for the boys to take as they galloped past; and it was a thrill for the old people to sit by their windows and watch as their offerings were received—the velocity and hunger with which the gifts were scooped up seeming somehow crudely representative of gratitude.

And it was a thrill, or at least a pleasure, for the boys, too, in the monotony of their run, to know that they could always keep looking forward to the next block, and the next; and as with their memories of those rare moments in which a nearly silent glide was achieved, so too in later years would they remember how it had been for each of them when they had first caught sight of the morning's distant, shining gift, glinting in the new-rising light, and of how they had surged slightly, unconsciously, thundering toward both their reward and their goal.

It made them stronger. They left nothing behind.

The games were murderous. The fans wore shining hardhats (the team was called the Roughnecks), and banged on their own helmeted heads with pipe wrenches after every score, or any particularly dramatic play. It was a deafening, maddening sound, not only to the fans inflicting this upon themselves, but to the players and referees, more disturbing than even the primal wailing of bagpipes, and deeply unsettling to the opposing team.

Cannons boomed blue smoke into the thin dry air every time there was an Odessa score, and trumpets blared so that the night's sounds were nothing less than those of war; and adrenaline, musky as dog piss, flowed uselessly through the veins of everyone in the stadium, and exited their pores and rose from the circular confines of the new stadium like mist or fog rising from a swamp as the morning light first strikes it on a summer day. The mist intermingled with particles of cannon smoke, and the raft of it was illuminated to a shifting, pulsing glow beneath the halogen intensity of the overhead stadium lights.

Out in the desert, on their nighttime geological digs, or their riverside camping trips, Richard and Clarissa could hear the distant cannons, and the crazed and arrhythmic pipe-and-helmet clattering; and hunkered there on the high reef, they would be able to see clearly the round bowl of incandescence from which those distant sounds were emanating—howls that again elicited in return, from all across the prairie, the savage yelps and wailing of the packs of coyotes, squalls and barks rising all around them from out of the darkness. It would seem to Clarissa and Richard in those moments that the two of them out there on the old frozen reef were the only ones not speaking the language of that excitement, and it was a lonely feeling for them to feel so voiceless, so disempowered.

In that loneliness, Clarissa might have let her heart move in closer to Richard's, there in the safety and distance of the darkness. She had not traveled this far into life, however, hoarding across the span of her days that one rare and delicate treasure, only to release it over the course of a single lonely or frightened evening, or even a hundred or a thousand such evenings.

It could seem to her sometimes though, in Richard's company—whether lonely or not, and whether in the distant-desert darkness or the full white light of day—that that tightly held cone-shaped muscle, the frozen stone-treasure of her ungiving heart, no longer rested on as secure a ledge as it once had, safe from the reach of the world, but was emplaced now on some slight slope; and that the substrate on which that stone heart rested was no longer as firm, but disintegrating, with siftings of sand grains fine as sugar being whisked from beneath it by the steady force of wind and water—forces she had once long ago, as a child, perhaps, viewed as dispassionate, but which she now perceived were hungry solely for her: hungry for the fairness of her skin, the tone of her muscles, the luster of her dark hair, the corona of her beauty.

There were the world's sounds, then, swirling and howling and shouting at one another, with Clarissa and Richard caught voiceless amidst that wild conversation; and there was the steady rushing of the night breezes above them, winding above them like the braids of rivers they could hear but never see; and visible before them was the mushroom-globe dome of blue-white light.

Scattered beyond the stadium and its dying, fading lights, after the game had ended, were the little lights of the town; and beyond that, the lonely vertical towers of incandescent white light that illuminated the outline of each solitary drilling rig, the men and their machines hunting always the elusive green-black swamps and seas of buried oil, hunting the last of it; and beyond the town, in all directions, the wavering yellow lights of the gas flares of the oil wells.

The effect of seeing all those orange fires out on the prairie below was that they might have been viewing a sprawling encampment of Kiowa or Comanche from a century before; or that they had come to the edge of some bluff from which vantage they could see a sight unintended for them—the plains of hell, or at least the gathering encampments of those waiting to be judged and sentenced.

But up on the reef, away from it all, Clarissa and Richard were safely beyond that queue, and knew it; and like lost or clumsy but diligent miners, they kept searching on their hands and knees, with claw hammer and pry pick, the corrugated stony earth before them, with their own lone lantern hissing and casting around them a tiny umbrella of light not unlike the larger one thrown by the distant stadium, or even the wavering gas flames from those little tents set up on the outposts of hell, awaiting their final reckoning.

Moths swarmed their one lantern as they crept through the darkness, searching with their eyes but also their hands for the finest and rarest of the fossils. Sometimes the rivers of wind above would shift direction—as if, in their ceaseless flow, they encountered some imaginary or invisible boulder and were momentarily rerouted—and in that stirring, Richard and Clarissa would be able to hear new sounds, the faint and far-off clunk and rattle of one or more of the desert's pumpjacks. And to Richard and Clarissa, working down on their hands and knees, with the old reef's river winds carrying the sounds toward them, and then away, it sounded sometimes not monotonous or arrhythmic, but like a kind of music; one that was as graceful as those rare moments of animal glide were for the running boys. Moments—fragments of moments—that they would remember forever.

They could both taste the peculiar and specific flavor and odor of the chalk dust as they broke the ancient fossils from the limestone grip of history: and Richard worked for the mystery and romance of being out on the plateau with Clarissa, and beyond the reach of the regular world.

Clarissa worked for the money, pocketing each Jurassic nugget, each Cretaceous sheet of fan coral, as if it were a typeset character from the ruins of the printing press of some grander civilization.

But despite the brute economic accounting of her search, and her desire to ride out of town, out past time's reckoning, she too was beginning to feel the faintest flickers of warmth and mystery, and the romance of it—those waves lapping at the previously firm sand beneath her bare feet, swirling loose sand now around her ankles—and like babes, or the ancient and the infirm, they crept on, groping the twisted, clastic texture of the reef, focusing on one tiny fossil at a time, while above them the world bloomed huge and alive; and with each swing of their rock hammers, more dust filled their lungs, so that it was as if they had reentered and were swimming in that reef, swimming in choppy waves, and were descending.

They began to like the chalky, acrid taste of the dust. It began to fill their throats and lungs, so that it was as if they were literally eating the mountain.

Whenever they stopped to rest for the night—shutting off the lantern and laying their rock hammers by their sides and curling up in a blanket and staring up at the stars, and listening to the rivers of wind above them—it would seem to them, those evenings, stranded out on the frozen reef, that they had finally crawled out some exciting and necessary distance ahead of the waves—had reached the unknown shore—and closing their eyes for a short and intimate nap, they would lie there on the bare pale stone, every bit as motionless as the myriad fossils around them.

 

The inland salt lake—Juan Cordona Lake—was perched above the plains just a few miles north of Horsehead Crossing. The lake was a scalloped basin that sat balanced like a shallow dish atop the buried cone of a subterranean salt dome, an entire underground mountain of salt.

The weight of the overlaying world was constantly squeezing down and re-forming this shifting, malleable, underground salt mountain, so that its movements were like those of an immense animal lying just beneath the surface, and almost always stirring.

The inexhaustible breath from this animal, the plumes and glittering grains of salt vapor, mingled ceaselessly, through simple capillary action, with the shallow waters of the lake or playa, saturating the lake (which was fed only by intermittent seasonal rains) with its brine and then supersaturating it, until the lake was no longer a lake but a sea of floating salt sludge, thicker than cake frosting.