All the Land to Hold Us (32 page)

 

The villagers who were down at the river that day gathered in great numbers around the fish, disbelieving as it banged around in the back of the jeep, unruly as a calf. The villagers reached in and touched its wetted back, thrilled by the power of the shudder that ran through the fish and into them as they did so, and they regarded the oilmen anew, as if having misjudged them, for most of what they did was below ground, as little seen or understood as work performed by smoke and mirrors; but this fish, real and tangible, seemed to offer some evidence of worth or talent on their part, and appeared to give refutation to a previously held opinion of the oilmen that had been less than favorable.

The landscape would be altered and then broken here, as it was everywhere they passed, made eventually unfamiliar even to the old men and women who had been born there—each new well, and each new road crisscrossing the desert and the mountains, burying their homelands with incremental abuse, and with their rarest and most vital of fluids, the groundwater, being slowly poisoned by the contamination and intrusion of all the drilling fluids—and yet, fifty years later, when the villagers were asked about the oilmen, and of what those times had been like, it would not be the pristine, immemorial desert landscape that had existed before the geologists had arrived that they spoke of, but instead, almost exclusively, the big fish.

They had seen the fish only briefly, that one day, strange as an alien, and stranger still for having been neither summoned nor suspected. It would become the watchword for how they thought of, and discussed, the oilmen ever after—not as the ones who had built a glittering civilization of pipelines and wellheads in the desert. Instead, they would remember them as the men who had produced from the desert a far more miraculous thing, the giant fish, glimpsed briefly but more real than any vaporous gas or rumor of wealth below: a creature twice as large as any of them would have guessed could exist, black as the desert sky at night, with long whiskers and sharp little teeth. A devourer of ducks and rabbits and perhaps even fawns; a behemoth and leviathan, and a creature wholly and totally dependent upon water, great amounts of water.

 

Rather than inviting the villagers, laborers, and their families, George Waller decided to throw a party for the fish, and he hired a boy to keep the fish alive for the three days before the event. Prostitutes would be flown in from Mexico City, a band from Vera Cruz, and caviar from Russia, via Houston. (None of the oilmen cared for the taste of caviar, but they ate it at such soirees nonetheless, suffering it as one of the necessary prices for asserting the privilege of flaunting their wealth. There was not a man among them who came from old money; they had each scrapped and fought their way into affluence, and in this, too, they were united.)

There was no clean water pit or tank in which to place the fish. The geologists did not want him living in the back of any of the jeeps, which were needed for field duty, and so for three days the boy, Tomás—fourteen years old, but small for his size and appearing younger—squatted beside the gasping fish, which was laid out on a wetted burlap bag in a small sandy pit, in the shade between the bunkhouse and a toolshed where he kept the fish hosed down with a steady trickle of cool ancient water that had been mined from a well that reached a thousand feet into the past.

The boy aimed the steady silver trickle first at one side of the huge flapping gills and then the other, watering the inflamed and feathery, irritated crimson gill linings as he would a garden, while the catfish, his eyes bulging, lay otherwise motionless, save for those gasping gills: a perfect hostage, connected tenuously and utterly nonnegotiably to that slender thread of cold silver water, and to the boy who was providing it.

The boy rested, squatting on his heels in the dust, and studied the fish as he hosed him and thought of the money he would earn for caring for the fish—a few dollars, or maybe, if the oilmen had been drinking, ten or even twenty—and as he moved the steady stream of water up and down the fish's broad back, the fish in turn studied the boy with its obsidian-round eyes, which had a gold lining to the perimeter, like pyrite. The fish panted and watched the boy, all that first day, and on through the dream of the night, and into the next day, while the heat built around them, rising steadily through the day. The heat gave birth in the summer-blue sky to beautiful white cumulus clouds, each one a distant world.

The boy grew dizzy in the heat on the second day—he was having to sit cross-legged now, had taken only the briefest of breaks to use the outhouse—and one of the cooks brought him a sandwich. A hypnosis began to overtake the boy, until it seemed to him that it was the trickling from his hose that was inflating the clouds; that he was watering the clouds as one would water a garden. And as the water trickled off the catfish's slick gray back and passed over its gasping gills (which were pink now, no longer bright red), his slimy whiskers grew bedraggled and droopy, making him appear sad and defeated.

The water pooled and spread across the gravel parking lot before wandering into the desert beyond, where bright butterflies swarmed and fluttered, dabbing at the mud the water was making, and it seemed to the boy that he and the catfish were frozen in time, and that the great gasping hulk of the fish would forever be hanging on to life, and that he would forever be a small boy watering it and keeping it alive, and that the huge fish would forever be somehow creating, birthing, those beautiful clouds against the summer sky.

Throughout the afternoon, one or two of the geologists would wander over to examine and admire the monstrosity—Richard was out on a location, up in the foothills—and after a few words they would all sit there hunkered, watching and listening to that silver stream of water, and the fish's gasping; and each time they gathered like that, the boy would guard himself, would become even more diligent, more perfect in the watering.

He would scowl at his task, trying to present himself as a man to them, so that he might be hired for more work at some near point, though he knew that the odds of the geologists noticing anything other than the fish were long. Nonetheless, the boy continued to glower, fierce and intent in the regularity of his task. He would be the best catfish-waterer they had ever seen; better than any they might ever have imagined. He would be the equal of the catfish. He would match his heart to it, and he would become its partner in its final days, and would destroy it.

 

Late on the second day—the boy bleary-eyed in his hypnosis, and falling asleep sometimes, the hose loose in his hand for long moments at a time—the first of the planes began to arrive, buzzing like dragonflies. Cars began arriving, too, dust plumes rising like a single long row of unfurling feathers, hurrying toward the oilmen's camp, drawn from all directions. The planes began to stack up down at one end of the runway, and the long cars began to accumulate in the parking lot; and one by one and two by two, the visitors wandered out back to examine Tomás's fish, and to ask questions about it; to be awed, terrified, revulsed.

For many of them—bankers, politicians, upper-class drifters—the sight of the fish would have been worth the journey alone; and it seemed to Tomás that some of them were even envious, and properly respectful of, his one task. It seemed to him that they lamented the lack of such a purpose in their own lives.

In the desert dusk, furry tarantulas crawled out from beneath their burrows and marched across the warmth of the gravel airstrip as the day finally cooled slightly. Some of the spiders were as large as a man's fist, mammalian in their size and appearance; and likewise, seeking to extend the heat of the day, the rattlesnakes came sidewinding out onto the runway, milking the last of the airstrip's warmth.

In the red dusk, for Tomás, the appearance of the tarantulas was as lulling as the constancy of a clock ticking in one's own home each evening, as was the occasional, fretful buzzing of the snakes' rattle-tipped tails as they slithered into and then negotiated their way around each other.

Each evening, all of his life, had been marked thus, so that it seemed to him the tarantulas' appearance, and the snakes', was more regular than the hands of time on any clock; that the tarantulas, each with their eight furry legs,
were
time, time itself becoming alive and creeping up from out of the ground, as were the snakes, and that the world of clocks and watches was but an abstract approximation, a crude representation of an infinitely more complex process.

 

He kept watering the fish, into and then through the second night, his head bobbing with fatigue. Sometimes he fell asleep so deeply and suddenly that he pitched forward, sprawling in the mud next to the fish; and for a while, on that second night, it began to seem to him that the fish was his friend, and that he had neither captured it nor found himself as its caretaker, but had in fact somehow created it, through his ceaseless watering, bringing it to life, up from out of the desert sand, like some miraculous gardener; and he began to consider how he might help the fish escape.

There was nowhere nearby for it to go but to the mud pit—even Tomás, with no understanding of the oil and gas industry, knew that the fish would not survive for long there—but it occurred to him that he might be able to somehow muscle it into the back of one of the jeeps, and steal the jeep, race the thirty miles to the river, splashing cup after cup of water onto the fish's gills before releasing it into one of the deeper stretches of the Madeira.

The fish continued to scrutinize him, as it had all the days before—he could not be sure if it was requesting anything of him or not—and farther toward dawn, he considered again the needs of his family, and the expectations brought about by the job, and he made the decision not to free the fish, but kept watering it, still half-hypnotized by the sound of the cool water draining onto its back. And by the time the red light of day began to return to the desert and the mountains, and the tarantulas began crawling back off into the sagebrush to take refuge against the coming heat, it seemed to him that the fish had reached some state of transcendence itself, and understood now there would be no release, and was accepting of that fact; that it did not blame Tomás for having failed to deliver a miracle that was the equal of the fish.

On through the morning he watered—a fire seemed to be going out in the fish's eyes, and an uncaringness seemed to be entering them; as if this was now just any old fish, instead of a great one. The cook who had taken to caring for the boy brought Tomás a burrito and sat with him for a short while, even held the hose for him while Tomás got up and went for a short walk to stretch his legs, and to visit the outhouse—and when Tomás returned, five minutes later, he was chagrined to see that the cook was haphazard with his watering, was sloshing the water over on one side of the fish and then the other—and the fish, discomforted by this erratic flow, was thrashing and shuddering, as if trying to swim some short distance farther forward to find once more that steady silver stream which the boy had been able to provide.

Tomás thanked the cook and took the hose from him and settled back in to his task; and eventually, the fish stilled itself again, relaxed back into its previous trance; and Tomás told himself that in this regard, he was being kind to the fish, in bringing it a few more moments of ease. It was not as great a gift to the fish as might have been a complete and daring escape, but it was a gift—another few hours.

On that third day, both Red Watkins and George Waller checked in on the fish. And although Tomás was surprised, having previously thought that all of the oilmen were identical, godlike in their powers, he saw now that despite the power of their excessive appetites, they were no different, really, than perhaps any other grouping of mankind; that the insipid could stand shoulder to shoulder with the noble, and the virtuous next to the wicked. That although there was a sameness in all men, there was also always some wedge of difference, some rift or fracture into which the character of a man seeped, and took root, and then grew or died.

It was simple and evident in even a single spoken sentence—Red Watkins placing his old liver-spotted hand on the boy's shoulder and asking him how he was doing, speaking to him in his own language,
Cómo está
?—while George Waller, having been absent during the entire process, was perturbed and critical of how bedraggled the fish looked, chagrined that it was not nearly as vibrant and formidable as it had been when he had first captured it, and disappointed that his guests might find it lacking, or less than he had described it.

“What have you done to him?” George Waller asked, then muttered “
Fuck
,” and might have kicked the boy had Red Watkins not been there; and Tomás knew a sadness and an anger then, that he had not ferried the fish back to the river, or at least tried to: though still his decision-making returned to the question of what was best for his family.

And sensing George Waller's useless and to some degree unearned opulence, he hated him, and shifted on his heels as if adjusting himself to accommodate the new weight of his hatred. He did not discard it, and it burned bright in his dark eyes even as all light continued to drain from the catfish's gold-rimmed eyes.

The two men left, with Red Watkins murmuring a few more words of encouragement, and abandoned Tomás to the heat of the day. The cook came back a short time later for the third time, bringing a bell pepper and Swiss cheese frittata with garlic and green onions, still steaming—which was so delicious that Tomás's eyes filled with tears at his fortune, as well as the fish's misfortune—and the cook also brought a little stump for Tomás to sit on, as he continued to water.

All through that last day, the guests continued to arrive, appearing like mirages from out of the desert heat, their droning planes wavering above the horizon, growing larger, then floating down onto the runway with a spray and clattering of gravel, the planes' maneuverability mushy in the thin hot dry air; and the cars appearing tiny and vaporous in the far distance, but finally coalescing into their true size when they arrived, with the engines groaning and ticking in the heat, and the windshields and grilles splattered with grasshoppers, which Tomás would be asked to scrub clean later in the night, after the fish was flayed and fried, and while the party was going on—Tomás scrubbing with hot soapy water and a washcloth, cleaning every inch of chrome, removing the remains of tens of thousands of grasshoppers and butterflies like confetti, so that by daylight, after the party, all the cars and planes would be gleaming again, and the princes and princesses, the kings and queens who still slumbered in drunken haze, would be able to rise noonward and, blinking at the desert scald of brightness, be handed a bloody mary as they emerged from the air-conditioned bunkhouse and went out to their chariots, into which they would fold themselves before roaring off into the void.