All the Land to Hold Us (11 page)

And by October, when the heat of the desert was finally broken, it seemed to both of them one morning that they had finally somehow crossed over into that new territory; crossing over perhaps in the night as they slept, with their passage across that unmarked boundary unnoticed, at the time. And they relaxed and relished being in such a country for the first time.

And rather than pushing on with zeal and ferocity, they slowed to a walk once more; strolling, as it were, hand in hand through the richer, newer fields. They paused to revel in their bravery.

For a while, they could glide, sweeping along on the momentum of their labors, having entered, through perseverance and diligence and some daring, that small expanse and moment of grace not unlike that which the football players sometimes achieved, when pulling the loaded wagons: that same glide in which every footstep, every surge, was in synchrony, with the recipients of that glide aware of the gift, and yet also quickly, comfortably, assuming it to be their due: and assuming that once such a glide had been reached, it would never again fall away.

(And after it did fall away, they persisted in believing, for the longest time, that it would be right back: that they were only a step, two steps, away. That they had only looked away for a moment and gotten distracted or slightly off-balance, but that with a little extra surge, a little extra power, they could step right back up into that slipstream. And sometimes they did, though other times they never saw it or knew it again; though even when they did find their way back into that current, they were surprised by how much more effort it took than what they had thought would be required. And finally, one day, they stepped back for the last time, and let it go on past, and remembered, for a while, but no longer participated.)

 

No sooner had the new intimacy been reached between them, however, than the fear caught back up with Clarissa: as if in turning to glance at the old country, she could not help but turn back toward it.

When the fear returned for her, it came like serpents snaking their way across a tin roof in the night. The new fear returned from all its old places: the despair that she had been born into the wrong place; that she was sinking in the world, unseen—but there was also a newer bolt of fear coming at her now, the fear that new fondness, if not love, was growing in her for Richard.

She held the fear silently—pretending to be wondering to herself what she would do with it, even as the other part of her knew full well what she would do with it.

And Richard, who picked up on the echo of her fear almost the first day it arrived—discerning the return of his own greatest fear, her flight, almost from the start, as might a veteran firefighter scent the newborn wisps of smoke from a distant fire—spent a tortured week, and then a month, denying it and holding it down, and then covering it with a second layer, and a third, until both he and Clarissa were wired tight from the overburden of that pressure, and from the rivers of sand that seemed to be coming in over her.

They went to a football game one Friday evening and barely spoke to one another; lost in their fears and worries they forgot to cheer for the Odessa team. Further into the game, they tried to cover up their inattentiveness but ended up cheering accidentally for a poor play rather than a good one.

They went home and retreated again beneath good sex, but it was only another layer above what lay below, and the more she said nothing of her leave-taking, the more it became a certainty to both of them.

She still had nowhere to go to, no prospect or avenue, but so immense now was her fear and her need that she was reduced to the desperation of choosing a flight based only upon the dream of a location by its name alone. The daunting task, with her back against the wall, of being forced to convert the abstract into the real.

Nothing with a punchy, stark, one-syllable name like Minsk, or Hunt; nothing rough and guttural, like Crockett, and nothing so similar to the treacherous sinuosity of the name of her own private hell, Odessa. Nacogdoches wouldn't do, nor Laredo, nor Del Rio.

Fort Worth sounded safe and solid, but she knew of its reputation as a former cow town. Houston intrigued her, though she feared she'd be lost in the lights. San Antonio, while inviting, was too close to Odessa.

It would never have occurred to her to consider taking flight from Texas entirely. Paris, New York, or San Francisco, and the possibility of failure, terrified her almost as much as did the desert. She wanted a staging ground, an eddy, between worlds, in which she could escape the old terror and make preparations for a second flight.

Like an opium eater, that fall, she pretended to still be in love, after having first entered that country; but she kept dreaming of, and searching the map for, other places, other names.

She knew or believed that she wanted something soothing, something riverine, perhaps, after so long an absence of such. She liked the
l
in Blanco, the white-blanket sound of it, and liked in her imagination the clear waters attendant to Rocksprings or Cat Springs. She liked also the
l
's and the femininity in the town names of Alice, and Galveston, and Temple; but in the end, she settled upon Dallas, as had so many before her—the city (she had seen pictures) gleaming and gargantuan with its skyscrapers rising above the flat grasslands and wavy hills around it, its own ambition and self-import fortress-like amongst the plains.

And in her mind, like a child constructing a diorama for a science project, she began assembling the hopes of some fantastic story for herself; and she said nothing of any of it to anyone.

Richard watched the distance between them widen, and in his mind observed pine needles resting on a forest floor dry out and then smolder from the heat: the reckless, unstoppable smoldering.

 

They still went into the desert, searching and gathering; and as if the call to her flight was rising now to full conspiracy with fate, she began to find treasures: inexplicable discoveries for which not even the gluttonous Herbert Mix could fashion a narrative.

Chief among these was a chest full of gold-hammered goblets, with ruby insets—two dozen of them, each heavy as lead, and spotless—discovered beneath the sand. Digging deeper then, they found the curve of a wagon wheel, and deeper still, the wagon itself.

More scratching revealed the tattered lace of a wedding dress—they dug more slowly now, Clarissa being careful as ever to keep her parasol balanced atop one shoulder—and beneath the ragged silk found the bare foot of a skeleton, still fully clothed, as if the traveler had just returned from the wedding and had not yet had time to change.

They dug deeper. Even Clarissa worked hard on this excavation, sometimes setting her parasol aside; and when her long-sleeved white linen shirt slipped down off her shoulder, for once she did not panic and slide it back over her shoulder, but kept digging, searching for the groom, if there was any, and perhaps even the wedding party.

Richard noticed that her shirt kept sliding down but thought it was a good sign that she was willing to expose herself—to have some other passion that exceeded her own protection.

It was true that there were places on her neck and shoulders where the perspiration of her labors and the friction of the sand was rubbing off the protection she'd so conscientiously applied, but Richard believed that between the three layers of protection—the parasol, the shirt, and the zinc oxide—she would be all right. A little sun might even be good for her.

By the middle of the afternoon they had most of the sand dug out from around the wagon, and had the bride—a tall, slender woman, still fully clad—sitting up on the back of the wagon, as if watching them work. Richard kept cautioning Clarissa to drink water, but she was relentless. He guessed the goblets to be worth $10,000 as a collection, but sensed that it was not for further treasure or gold that she dug.

“Slow down,” he told her, as he might caution her of some precipice ahead, but she shook off his warnings, working as if intoxicated by love; and when he took her arm to suggest to her again that she be cautious, she finally agreed, but pulled him under the faint slatted shade of the wagon and made love to him, keeping her shirt on as was his request, but nothing else.

Even for their usual energy, it was for both of them an event of surprising uncontrollability: as if they had wallowed down into some suppressed reservoir of an eros and lust so raw and overpressured that it might injure or even destroy them, upon their exodus.

They bumped and crashed against the wagon above them, in their overhead hoistings, and with their knees and elbows and the arced shape of their movements carved out deeper pits in the cool and newly exposed sand, but feeling nothing, only burning.

Their grappling and lifting threatened to shake the wagon apart, and the bride sitting above them tipped over on her side, seemed now to be holding or clinging to the wagon as she might long ago have done as it jounced over the rocky path.

There was no other sound in the desert, and eventually, the strange energy of explosive lust that they had unearthed passed on through them, and on up into the heated blue sky; and they were once more merely hot and exhausted lovers, tentative, and once again spent.

They lay there for only a short while, Richard wanting to spoon in and be tender for a while, but Clarissa was anxious, as if still with sexual energy, to resume digging. He was able to hold her for a few minutes, though, and as they lay there, sweating and gritty, latticed in sun and shadow, it began to feel to Richard as if he was holding, in both arms, an enormous fish; and though she did not struggle, he could feel the coiling of her muscles, their readiness once more for flight, and he released her.

Clarissa forced herself to lie there with him for another thirty seconds after being released, with their bare feet and ankles still twined loosely together and sticking out from beneath the wagon, so mocking of the bones that dangled likewise above them from the bride sitting on the back of the wagon as if standing watch over them.

They each drank some water afterward, and dressed, but soon Clarissa was working the shovel again with the same intensity.

By dusk they had the horses unearthed, the team of four still in cracked leather harness and dead on their knees, heads bowed not as if in defeat but only rest; though still they could find no groom, nor any other skeletons.

Clarissa grew irritable.

The sun was setting orange behind the dunes and the heat was off the land. They had brought picnic supplies with them, and they stopped now to reconnoiter. With the sun no longer direct upon them, the sand gave them less warmth now, though still it provided plenty, as if some great fire were nearby. Clarissa took off her shirt and bra, and Richard could see then that she had gotten a lot of sun. He could not tell yet how bad it might be, or if it could even be called a proper sunburn, so pale was her skin elsewhere; nor could she yet feel any pain, and if anything, she seemed to be infused with the general pleasure one sometimes feels after a long full day in the sun, purged and cleansed.

They would have liked to have sat in the back of the wagon for their picnic, but ceded that space to the skeleton, treating the bride even across the century of her death with the deference they would provide to a stranger; and there was in their deference also the acknowledgment that the wagon was still, in some manner, the possession of the bride rather than her discoverers.

They sat cross-legged in sand-scallops they carved out next to the wagon, looking like students seated at the feet of an esteemed teacher, receiving a counsel and an instruction they had long been awaiting.

Richard poured wine into two of the golden ruby-studded goblets, and he carved open a small, perfect cantaloupe. They ate the wedges of it with their hands, wiping their mouths afterward with the crooks of their sunburned arms. He had brought strawberries and chocolate bars too, and in the heat the chocolate had melted, so they stirred the strawberries (picked only the day before from the garden of one of Herbert Mix's neighbors) in the chocolate, and Richard fed those to her, and she took them from his fingers with her mouth, not with any of the old caution or hesitancy, but neither was it with any true zeal.

Instead, she regarded him, as she ate the strawberries and licked the chocolate from his fingers, with a clear-eyed, evaluating look that seemed to possess the ability, that day at least, to see into the future: and watching her watch him, as she slowly chewed the strawberries, he would have liked to have known what it was she was seeing, and how far out she was seeing it.

He leaned in against her breast, and for a moment she let him, but then would have no more of it, and rose, taking both of his hands, leaving him—they both knew now, as if that final decision had been arrived at with the help of the teacher's tutelage—and in that moment, it was a realization so strongly felt that it seemed to Richard later, in memory, that he remembered hearing something crack at the time.

She led him back to the initial treasure chest, and from that point, they each resumed digging in separate directions, still not knowing exactly what they were looking for.

As they worked, Clarissa's fervor returned, until it would have seemed to a stranger that she was maddened by this knowledge of the treasure's closeness at hand: and they worked into the night, excavating wandering ditches around the wagon, waist-deep waterless moats that were only slightly concentric, and which would have appeared from above more like the ladder-sticking of chromosomes, or the bent and groping thready arms of bacilli, than any plan or pattern.

Around midnight, exhausted, but having found nothing else (Clarissa still refused to believe a bride would travel across the desert with a four-horse team and a trunk full of golden goblets; there had to be more skeletons, and more treasures), they lifted the bride carefully down from the wagon and set her off in the dunes at some distance and then tore apart the wagon for firewood, which they burned to stay warm.