The Diezmo by Rick Bass (top fiction books of all time TXT) 📗

His voice trailed off into a laugh of utter delight, and I blushed and said nothing, but after we had walked quite a bit farther I said, “You’re wrong,” and he smiled after that, and did not argue.

Each day, Bustamente directed us to a wide and shallow stream far outside of town, from which we were to gather decorative rocks for the road. The chalky square-cut quarry was the source for our paving stones, but it was this stream that yielded the finer, prettier rocks for the project. He called it Rio Seco, the dry river, though it was not dry that spring. Judging by the boulders it had moved, sun-bleached and round, and by the scatter of driftwood, the water-polished assemblage of giant cottonwoods piled into fantastic clumps of debris, it was evident that huge torrents of water had cascaded down the floodplain not long ago, transporting the rattling, clattering boulders and great hollowed-out cottonwood spars. Scatters of giant stone, boulders as big as houses, were nestled in amid cobbles the size of a man’s fist. Our task was to select the most attractive, ornamental river stones and carry them, along with the bags of the valuable white river sand, all the way back to the road.

Working at the river, we had slightly more freedom. It was nearly an hour’s walk down a steep trail to the river bottom, and our small gang—McLaughlin, myself, and a dozen other recruits, all young men, stronger and healthier than the rest—soon reached a tacit understanding with the guards that we would not run away and they would not have to descend and then ascend with us each time we went down the steep path to the river. I poured my energies into the hauling, so I often did the work of three or four men—accumulating a greater stack of boulders on the days when we went down to the Rio Seco, or cutting and laying more stone on quarry days. The guards and Bustamente noticed my work, although Bustamente almost always stayed up on the road, two miles distant, after having taken us down to the river only that first day, wandering out among the tangled cataclysm of stone to show us what kinds of rocks he preferred.

The river was brilliant and heated, dazzling. But on the riverbanks beneath the ash, cottonwood, and sycamore trees, it was green and cool and shady, with the leaves fluttering in the spring wind, and it was easy to lie in the white sand and listen to the wind in the tops of the trees and to imagine that in another life the stonemason Ewen Cameron might have enjoyed working with the Rio Seco’s stones, even as another part of me knew there was at least as much chance that had he remained living, he would be using these very stones to try to bash in the heads of our captors.

Not all of the boneyard of the river was parched. In some places a ribbon of water still trickled through the riverbed’s center, running and then pooling before disappearing for a while, only to reemerge elsewhere. Cool breezes bathed these wetted portions of the canyon and rose from the sparkling, riffling water scented with the growth of new life. Tiger-striped butterflies and those the colors of emeralds and amethysts gathered in great numbers by the salty riverside puddles to sip before rising into a flashing kaleidoscope of escape, each one a tornado of broken church glass, frightened by our own sweating, salty, labored approach.

Out among the boulders, our footing was uncertain and we slipped often. We jettisoned the boulders when we could—sometimes they cracked in half when they landed—though other times we could not turn loose of them quickly enough and smashed our arms and thumbs and fingers, so that the river canyon echoed with the sound of curses, and the stones and boulders were smeared and painted with the bright red palm prints of such mishaps, as were some of the stones that would ultimately go into the road above.

Still, all in all it was a place of peace, not just for me but for each of us. Bright songbirds of every color were drawn to the water and the leafy foliage that grew alongside the river. Wild roses bloomed on gravel-bar islands and between the boulders, existing seemingly on nothing more than the rocks themselves, and air. Hummingbirds whirred about the blossoms, probing.

The cottonwood spars lined both banks, marking where the river had been, and served as impromptu benches for whenever we took a break, which, for the other workers, was increasingly often. I noticed that each of them was lulled into a state of great sleepiness and contentment by the sound of the river. The morning and afternoon light that passed through the riverside foliage cast a shimmering green on their faces, and sometimes they would lie down on various of the cottonwood spars, after searching for and finding the one polished spar that most perfectly fit the length and shape of their bodies: the curves and hollows and tapers of each spar determining to some extent the position of repose into which the prisoners settled.

The soldiers lay as if stupefied, nestled into the slick fit of their various logs, the men and logs both looking like the carcasses of giant fish that had washed ashore. They smoked precious cigarettes they had been able to purchase or to reassemble from the scraps of butts gathered roadside, and when those were gone they cut crooked lengths of grapevine and smoked those, inhaling the thick sour smoke until they were nearly intoxicated and the riverside was filled with the blue haze of their exhalations. It was not unlike the scene of a battlefield, with the fallen soldiers, arms outflung and faces vacant to the sun, and the earth beneath them torched, and the smoke of cannonade still lingering; and if they did not know bliss, in those moments, they seemed at