All the Land to Hold Us (8 page)

Occasionally, in gusting winds in which the weathervanes spun around and around, as if enthused with glorious indecision, the heated friction of the spins would be too much, and the skeletons would snap off at the knees and topple over with a faint clatter into the salt, where sometimes they would become detrital mounds, though other times they sank quickly, to a depth of a foot or two; and suspended thus in the saline solution, they would be perfectly preserved forever.

A man or woman poling along in a canoe or flatbottomed skiff would have been able to navigate sometimes by the upright gray-white spars of the standing skeletons, and the remnants of skeletons; and on an overcast day, one in which the sun's glare had not lit the entire lake surface into millions of dazzling, glittering salt crystals, the paddler would have been able to look down at almost any point in the journey and see suspended in the salt mire like schools of fish the motionless residue of someone's ancestors.

 

Richard wandered through the script of his days, unaware of any patterns of history or consequence, taking each day instead as if carrying mindlessly but enthusiastically one heavy stone that, at day's end, he placed in a pile before returning the next day with another, until finally, eventually, his vision for various things became so acute that it seemed gradually that it was as if he had been chosen all along for the knowledge of such things—and even chosen, perhaps, for Clarissa, after all: for it was not long after his fluency with the landscape began to mature that there was awakened in him, like a corresponding echo, the desire to see as deeply beneath the mask of the hidden animate things, the things that a frightened heart withholds.

And in that learning, he found that he desired to travel deeper into that territory.

He did not tell Clarissa of this newer, and secondary, yearning. But she could scent it, as it developed, as surely as the odor of salt in the air, and as surely as is felt the crispness in the autumn from the first night-wind down out of the north; and she hated feeling that change occurring within him, that developing hunger. Always before, there had been the tacit understanding that it would be just sex and companionship between them, nothing more; temporal, as shallow as the lake.

He was young and awkward. He was not to prove as gifted at gaining entrance into her hidden fears as he was at discovering treasures hidden beneath a static landscape. Hers was a moving target. There might yet have been somewhere a traveler or hunter with the ability to know her heart and gain the wildness of her trust, but such skill did not belong to the young miner Richard was then.

It did not keep him from falling. And it did not keep her from despising and being further attracted to him, in that falling.

 

They would picnic at Juan Cordona Lake, in the early evenings and on into nightfall, and on overcast days and, finally, in the brilliance of day, which was when Richard most enjoyed being out there, and when he most wanted Clarissa to be there. She loved the lake, too—of all their explorations, it was her favorite place—but she was terrified of its brilliance and heat, which was a step up of a quantum order from even the searing potential of the dunes. She was certain that thirty seconds' exposure to the lake would fry her creamy skin to the color of an iron skillet.

In the months before she had met him, and before she had swum Horsehead Crossing with him, and prowled the reef on her knees at night with him, and even safely wandered the sunlit dunes with him—terror high in her throat, at that last venture, but a giddiness, too, after it was over and she had emerged unburned—she would never in ten thousand years have gone out to the salt lake in the broad light of day; but because he was earning bits and pieces if not all of her trust, and because he was helping kindle some warmth if not actual spark within her—not fire, but warm, pleasing friction—she acquiesced, and followed him out into the very place that held more fear for her than any other; the place that was capable (or so in her fear she believed) more than any other of destroying the only dream she had ever had or known.

And in his company, she began to taste the freedom of what it was like to first feel that warmth, if not burning, down inside her center, beneath that carefully protected surface.

What was reckless for her—a glimpse of the salt flat's high-noon brilliance—would of course have been commonplace, mundane for another; but the borders of her fears were her own, and there were times, when with him, that she pushed against them as gamely as any high-altitude mountain climber ascended some final summit.

Even a good man is still a man
, she told herself, and she feared that there was some part of him that was so bent on her seeing the salt flat at noon simply because she was resisting it; that only her fear attracted him, just as the flight of prey summons always the attention of the predator. Both of them would have agreed, honestly, that there was some of that.

But because of what he had shown her of Horsehead Crossing and the Castle Gap notch, and the dunes—because of his pagan celebration of the elemental things and places of his life, and because of his strange goodness—she gave him more faith and trust, as one would a young horse that one had been working with on a regular basis.

And she would have been honest too in admitting to herself, as well as to him, that his unselfishness was an attractant to her, so lacking was she in this characteristic; and that in this way it was also as if she was the hunter, her attention drawn by the appearance of the very thing that had thus far eluded her.

For his part, Richard wanted her to see how otherworldly the lake could be, under the cruelest of conditions; and how the world could become inverted, or so it seemed, in the blink of an eye or in the dissolution of some final impediment to the heart. Given one last breach, new rules and beliefs could come flooding in.

The thing that was her terror could become—given one more attempt, one more day of trust or effort—a source of almost overpowering beauty.

He wanted her to see how the movement of halite crystals, stirred each day by the same winds that rearranged the dunes, sometimes helped sharpen into angular prisms nearly every salt crystal on the lake, trillions of such prism-diamonds exploding the lake into a pulsing iridescence of almost maddening beauty, a phenomenon that was witnessed most powerfully either just before or just after the sun's zenith.

The curves and waves of radiance were different each time it was viewed. Sometimes little wind-driven eddies of salt would form tiny ridges, only an inch or two higher than the surrounding peneplain; but that faint topographic relief would be enough, when the sun's angle finally properly bent and ignited the bouncing, magnified, colorful rays through those crystals, to throw arcs and coronas of banded light up into the air above the salt lake, in addition to scattering the light like spilled gemstones across the lake's heated surface.

When the light entered each day's arrangement of wind-scoured halite, it was like watching energy entering a filament, like life being born. That was the good part—not simply ascending the crest of some sere and gigantic dune to look down upon the bowl of light and color, a sight all the more fantastic for the nearly absolute absence of color elsewhere in the desert (only the occasional bloom of cactus, or the lime and lemon and watermelon hues of the passing-through songbirds)—so that it seemed logical and natural to the viewer to understand that perhaps on some level it was its long absence that had finally summoned the missing thing.

Best of all was to be there already waiting for the phenomenon, and to see its birth or arrival: to hear the lake's shallow salty waves lapping against one another in the night, stirred by the wind and by the clockwise turning of a sleeping or resting earth; and to see the idea of incandescence conceived, then, in that first dim light of dawn, and to watch the light's approach, reaching its fingers in strafes through the flat-cracked tiles and the individual nuggets of salt; the light and the color being born, then, soundlessly, but with an onrushing beauty that seemed to possess a shushing sound, as the image of the salt lake bedazzled, caught fire, and leapt into the viewer's mind.

In those moments, beholding such transformation, with the full knowledge that the dull, brown, regular world lay behind them now, it would seem to the viewers, to the travelers, that they were looking at nothing less than the biblical streets of heaven, lined with silver and gold and gemstones; and it would be both a wonderful and frightening revelation, in exchange for which privileged vision great things would be expected of them; and that they would have to reach deeper than they had ever gone, to deliver.

It was important to Richard that Clarissa witness this. He told himself he would not push her beyond that point—that she would be free to reject or accept that vision of the landscape—but he wanted her to see it, and he wanted to be there with her when she saw it.

And perhaps he was pushing her, and being gluttonous, ravenous for her heart, as he began to consider, idly at first but then with increasing imagination, what it would be like to fall in love with her, and capture, and perhaps even tame, her frightened heart.

He considered children, a life of domesticity, family.

He did not let his mounting hunger preclude gentleness or kindness. He understood her fear, or thought he did, and took every precaution to lead her tenderly into the place he wanted to show her.

When they went to the lake, they traveled with two vehicles, towing a jeep behind them as an emergency backup. Richard carried extra gas and extra tubes of zinc oxide; extra water (over a hundred gallons of it; two barrels mounted atop his flatbed truck), and a large tent in which they would spend the morning hours, drinking tea as if on safari and cooking pancakes and bacon on the hissing gas stove, peering through the mosquito netting, sweating already at first light, man and woman nude again, and once more bechalked in thick paste, should any stray ultraviolet death come slanting in through the canvas fabric.

Clarissa was constantly reapplying zinc to herself, as the sweat rivulets traced little unprotected paths across the self-cherished vessel of her body, and they would pass the morning in the tent, watching and waiting, reading paperbacks or napping or lovemaking, and sipping tea afterward.

The greasewood campfire just outside their tent would still be smoldering from where they had stayed up half the night watching the stars, and walking the lake's shore, searching by lantern light for arrowheads and other lesser memorabilia Clarissa might be able to sell to Herbert Mix, should the museum in Austin be uninterested. They would sometimes be able to pick up a few stations on the car radio—the smoke from the fire kept the bugs away, though always, the moths swarmed the flames—and they would dance to blues and waltzes, the radio's music faint and staticky, their bare feet moving eloquently across the dusty, salt hardpan, which in the moonlight was paler than their flesh, paler than bone, possessing in the night some luminosity greater and brighter than it had even in day's full light.

To a distant onlooker it might have seemed that they were dancing on the level floor of some marble ballroom; though to the dancers, so severe and well-defined and alive were the senses that there could be no misinterpretation of anything but what was: they were dancing barefoot in the cool wind-cut dust of salt, the ground soft beneath their feet, the night cool upon their unclothed bodies, their hands warm on each other's backs, the scent of the lake of salt richer smelling than even that of a churning ocean.

The Mormon crickets would be calling back in the dunes, the fire glowing and crackling as the coals popped and shifted and settled, indistinguishable from the static of the radio transmission; and perhaps sharpest of all, there would be the scent of each other's body, a scent that was for them an accumulation of the events of the day: zinc oxide and sweat and clean time-washed sand and salt, sex and barbecued shrimp from the grill, and margaritas from the ice chest.

Even the scent of the sun still echoing from the canvas of their big wall tent was so sharp as to provide for them, in their mind's eye, an outline of the tent—a kind of vision, in that regard, so deeply were the senses felt, those nights, dancing together in that salt dust.

There was no marble-floored ballroom. There was only something infinitely finer.

A hundred yards farther out, two hundred yards, the skeleton sentinels seemed to pivot, watching them. It might have seemed that they too were out on some vast floor, though without partners.

The salt kept oozing up from beneath the lake, a slow upwelling fountain of it; and under the cool stars, Clarissa and Richard were safe from the scalding sun of the next day, as well as the gone-by sear of the previous day's sun; and in the morning, after a night of such revelry, and such an intermingling of spirits—theirs, certainly, but also theirs and the landscape's, and the two of them tucked in so safely, if precariously, between the past and the future—they would crawl out of the tent in the first light of daybreak, to void in the dunes, crouching like animals, and would feel the rising, drying winds of the day already stirring around them.

It seemed odd to be able to smell so much salt, so deeply, and yet not to hear the stretch and thunder of breaking waves.

Sometimes Richard would imagine having a child, and taking her to the ocean, to hear such sounds.

They would burn their toilet paper when they were finished, setting the scraps of paper afire like the pages from some diary of adolescence, pages that had both nothing and everything to do with the adults they had become, and then after burying their spoor in the sand, they would return to the tent to nap, and read, and to wait for the coming spectacle of light.

Passing by the shoreline salt flat where they had danced the night before, they would always be astounded by the evidence of the previous night's activity. They would bend down and try to parse individual elegant arcs and sweeps of their movements—and sometimes, across short distances, they could read the sign of such passage—but for the most part the tracks they left behind were scrambled together, laid atop and beneath each other in what appeared to be an impenetrable and indecipherable scuffling.