All the Land to Hold Us by Rick Bass

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