by Rick Bass
Now the stories came rolling in like waves—Matthew this and Matthew that—and Wallis wondered if they could be talking about the same man he worked with. He was still physically strong, and in some ways reckless—though to Wallis it seemed as if the recklessness had been transformed, under Old Dudley’s guidance, into more of a gluttony—and Wallis had the strange feeling that they were talking about someone from another lifetime, even another century.
If Matthew still had the strength—the flamboyant strength they were talking about—then Wallis had not seen it. He was a great geologist, but all that myth lore—if Matthew was still that way, it must be only underground now, in his dives.
Wallis listened to stories of Matthew performing feats of strength—carrying propane refrigerators on his back, even as a boy—and of unbounded energy, as if in eternal adolescence, eternal growth—stripping naked in the summer and covering himself with a film of gasoline, then lighting himself on fire and leaping out of the bushes anc| into the river, into the back eddy where the swans used to rest, back when there had still been swans in the valley, thirty years ago.
“I saw him do it a couple times,” Artie said. “He’d go ass-busting out there, all lit-up, and splash down right in the middle of all those swans. The swans wouldn’t make a sound—they don’t utter a peep until the day they die. I guess that’s why he was fucking with them, trying to see if he could get them to croak, or peep, or make some damn sound—and sometimes he’d even grab one by the wing, or brush against it as he went into the river, and that swan would get a little gasoline on it, and for a few moments, while it was rising into the air and then flying, part of the swan would be on fire. I tell you what,” Artie said, “it was a thing to see. Matthew would bob up to the surface and float there, and just laugh. It was always just a film of gas that would get on the swans—the flame would burn out before it did any damage to the feathers, or to the bird itself—but it was a sight to see. You could be working in town and look up and see seven or eight swans flying past, over the tops of the trees, with one of them on fire, and you’d know he was down there fucking with those birds.”
“He was such a sweet boy,” Helen said. “Such a fun boy. I was always having to run behind him to be sure he didn’t hurt himself. I was an old woman, even then.” She touched her weathered face and laughed. “My God, he aged me. He wore me out,” she said. “In the summer, you could see burnt bushes all up and down the river from where he’d hidden, lit himself, and then gone running through the brush. He tried to get farther from the river each time. It looked like otter-slides, up and down the river. Sometimes I’d get to the river and find some bushes still burning, and the swans would be gone, and I wouldn’t see any Matthew, wouldn’t know where he was. I’d call and call for him, and he wouldn’t come in til late that night, or sometimes even the next day; said he’d gone exploring, had gone up into the mountains.”
Helen pressed her hand to her heart, which Wallis imagined to be about the size of a pea or a raisin, now.
Stories of his endurance. “That dang wall,” Artie said.
Helen smiled, and explained to Wallis, “He started building it when he was seven. Just started hauling rocks in from the mountains and stacking them. Then when he began driving his jeep, he hauled them in that.”
Wallis had seen those pictures, also yellowed and ancient, in the hallway that led to the bar’s restrooms. In those photos, not just Matthew, but all manners of men, women, and children had been carrying and stacking the big square rocks. “I thought they were miners,” Wallis said, “or workers in some quarry somewhere.”
Helen shook her head. “Matthew started it, but by the time he was sixteen, the thing was twenty miles long, and so beautiful that the rest of us started helping him with it—working on it whenever we pleased, like a hobby.” Helen reached in her coat for a pack of cigarettes, tried to light one. Wallis watched the hypnotic snap of her lighter, which finally took flame. Helen’s hand shook afterward, just from that simple exertion.
“I was out back, bringing wood from the shed to the porch,” she said, motioning to her snowshoes.
Mel said, “Oh shit, Helen, I’m sorry, I forgot,” and Helen shrugged, clearly pleased with her martyrdom. “We’ll haul some in for you tonight,” Mel said. She told Wallis, “I always help Helen bring her wood in. Matthew used to do it before he went away, but now I do it every autumn. It’s already cut and in the woodshed, curing. I just need to bring it to the back porch.”
It was strange, Wallis thought, the way they kept talking about Matthew: as if believing he were going to come back someday.
“Why did he build the wall?” Wallis asked, and Helen shrugged, drew on her cigarette. She seemed to be falling away, dreamy-eyed. “Does anyone still work on it?” he asked.
“Not so much, anymore,” Artie said. “Sometimes a little. But not like before.”
“It’s real pretty,” Mel said. “You’ll have to see it in the summertime.”
“But it doesn’t serve any purpose?” Wallis asked.
“No,” said Mel.
Wallis and Mel said their good-nights and went to the door. Danny called out, “Wait a minute!” as they were leaving—they didn’t hear him—and produced from behind the counter a bulky camera, and snapped off a quick crooked photo of the two of them going out together, with snowflakes swirling in through the door.
They crossed the street and hauled firewood in silence, glad to be out in the cold fresh air, carrying one armload after another from the shed to the back porch, wearing down a packed trail through the knee-deep snow. Helen’s firewood was fresh-split larch, dry but heavy, and Wallis enjoyed the smell of it. He scented, too, the deer blood still on him as his body warmed.
Tired and tipsy—four drinks for Wallis, but only one for Mel—they skied home, following the snow-covered wall. At one point where the road crossed a small creek Mel said, “Come here,” and skied a short distance into the woods, following the creek.
Stars glimmered broken in the riffles. Mel was crouched next to a mound of snow. She laid her head against the ground. “Listen,” she said.
At first Wallis heard nothing—his face right next to Mel’s, his eyes watching hers. She watched him back, but she was listening to the ground below.
“What?” he said, but she only held a finger to her lips, and kept listening, watching Wallis as if willing him to hear it, and then he did. He had to reach deeper to hear it, and when he did, it was like a background sound he had already been hearing but hadn’t paid attention to. It was a kind of humming.
“This is where he sleeps every year,” Mel said, and for a moment Wallis thought she was talking about Matthew again. “An old black bear,” she said. “He must weigh five hundred pounds by now. This is his creek,” she said. “He dens here below the cliff every November and lets the snow cover him.” She pointed to a small hole in the snow-mound. “He’s breathing only about once a minute. His blood is right at thirty-two degrees. But his breath is still warm. It melts the snow for these blowholes.” Mel smiled. “Do you think he hears us?” she asked. “Do you think he hears us, and is dreaming about us?”
“I don’t know,” said Wallis.
“I think he does,” said Mel.
They lay there over the sleeping ice-hump as if trying to give him extra warmth, and listened. They could hear the creek gurgling.
“When will he come out?” Wallis asked.
“Mid-April,” Mel said. “When he hears the leaf-buds opening. When the creek sounds different, and when the sun starts to strike the ice cave again—when it starts to glow inside. He’ll get up and stir a few times in the winter—will stick his head out, may even walk around in a circle, as if confused, just checking things out—but then he’ll go back into hibernation.”
“Have you ever seen them do that, in winter?” Wallis asked. “Come out of their den?” He tried to imagine it: the big black bear wandering across the snow, moving like a sleepwalker, just going in circles, and almo
st everything else in the woods silent.
“No,” said Mel. “Sometimes I’ll come across their tracks, and I’ll know that I’ve missed them by a day, or even hours—but I’ve never actually seen it. It may be one of those things you don’t see,” she said. “It may be one of those things you’re not supposed to see.”
“Like what else?” Wallis asked.
Mel shrugged. “I don’t know. Some kind of forbidden thing. Come on,” she said, “let’s get home.”
Once back at the cabin, they hauled water from the creek. “It’s been a long time since I haven’t carried it all by myself,” Mel said. They began heating the water on the wood stove for a bath. There was a water closet, too, with an overhead reservoir and a chain attached to it, which, when pulled, released the water from the box and down a pipe, to flush the toilet. Wallis filled that, and, as was the cabin’s rule, left a backup bucket by the toilet’s side, so that the next person did not have to go out in the middle of the night.
The cabin warmed quickly. “How old is it?” Wallis asked.
“Nineteen-forty-seven,” Mel said. “Matthew’s parents were teenagers when they built it. The valley had only been settled by whites for about thirty years.”
“It’s so new,” Wallis said, “to seem so old,” and Mel laughed. “Everything is the same age up here,” she said. “Everything is ten thousand years old, and that’s that. The last glacier went away, and the northern forest filled in. Hunters came down into this country after the ice left, killed the last mastodons and mammoths, but other than that, things are still pretty much the same. Fourteen-ninety-two, seventeen-seventy-six, eighteen-sixty-three, nineteen-forty-seven—it doesn’t matter. It’s all the same age. It’s not an old country. It just feels that way.”
It bothered Wallis that Mel thought ten thousand years was a long time. He looked out into the night—at the flakes falling past the window and brushing up against it. “What’s the oldest a tree gets to be, up here?” he asked.
“The cedars down in Ross Creek are over a thousand.”
“So there have only been nine or ten generations of cedars, since the ice left?”
She stared at him, understanding for a moment—seeing things the way he saw them—but she caught herself—righted herself, is what it felt like to her—and she shook her head and said, “You’re just like my father—you city guys. You forget how long time can be—four seasons, for instance. You like to compress things, rather than drawing them out. Attenuating them.” But she smiled.
“Is Matthew a city guy?” Wallis asked. He couldn’t picture him being anything but: had never seen him, on a weekday, in anything but a suit.
“He is now,” Mel said.
They took turns bathing in three inches of water, but were glad to have it. The salt of their sweat mixed with the steam, and the blood on them melted once more and slid from their bodies, viscous, like afterbirth, then rough and clean as each toweled off. It was not yet ten o’clock. Mel said that in the winter she usually went to bed around eight.
They were too tired to eat. “I don’t have your room made up,” Mel said. “I didn’t really think you were coming. You can sleep in here by the fire tonight. It’s a mess in that other room—backpacks, tents, sleeping bags, snowshoes, lanterns.” She laid a pallet out for him—elk and deer hides—and exhausted, he lay there beneath them, with the hides feeling heavy as stone. Mel lay down on the pallet not that far from him—less than arm’s length—and propped her head up on one hand.
“What are you thinking?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he said.
“What’s Matthew like down there?” she asked. “Is he really happy?”
Wallis lay there with his hands behind his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, he’ll laugh at something, if it’s funny. It’s not like he’s really tormented, or anything. But I wouldn’t say he has a deep peace.”
“Do you?” Mel asked.
“I’m not looking for it,” Wallis said. “I’m just looking to drill ahead.”
“Like a machine,” Mel said. “Like Old Dudley teaches you to be.”
Wallis shook his head. “I think of it as being more like an animal that has to do only one thing—that spends all its waking and dreaming moments thinking of only one thing: the next thing.”
“I only know of one kind of animal like that,” Mel said.
“He’s not unhappy,” Wallis said. “Not like he’d be if he wasn’t doing it.”
“I know that,” Mel said. “I’ve known that part for a long time.” She rolled over on her back. “Thanks,” she said. “It’s good to hear it again,” and Wallis was reminded strangely, sadly, of a child who is told an old familiar story again and again: who needs the repetition of it for solace—and no matter whether it is a happy story, or a terrible one—only that it is the familiar story, and therefore the one that makes sense.
They lay there and listened to the fire die, and when the fire was soon silent, they moved with peace into that half-land between waking and sleeping—both of them beneath the spread of the hides, yet separate. Mel imagined that she was slipping into the fit of her steady stride across the snowy landscape, looking for tracks, while Wallis imagined that, finally, he was descending, as if down a mine shaft—only one possibility; and the last conscious thought he had was a new one to him, one that might have come from Mel’s perspective: a thought so strange that for a moment he opened his eyes and felt the urge to right himself, to catch his balance.
His thought was, How fast a single day goes by, but how much you can fill it with, which in turn seems to slow it down so—but then he was gone, unconscious, and listening with his body but not his mind to the old echoes and stories and days of the elk above him; and farther above, to the sound, the pressure, of the snow landing on the roof and pressing down, sealing them into a place for a little while, even as in their dreams they strived to keep traveling.
Their breath rose in twin trails, slow rivers of warmth from their sleeping lungs, while the rest of their world, canted now away from the sun, cooled and sank, as time—their time—fell away and below, like a thing shed.
IN THE MORNING, AT GRAY LIGHT—NINE O’CLOCK, AND snowing harder than ever—Wallis woke to find that she was gone. When he went out onto the porch, her tracks were already buried; he had no clue of which direction she might have traveled, or when she would be back.
He went back inside, built the fire up, and scavenged for food, of which there was not much: a small bag of oats, some dried mushrooms, and tea bags; some stale bread and purple jam. The salmon. A bag of potatoes. He felt a wave of shame at not having considered the weight of his existence in her life—the simple weight of his appetite—much less her own need for space, solitude. He understood that it was Matthew’s cabin, or had been, but certainly it seemed to be hers now. Matthew and Old Dudley only got out here two or three times a year now, though sometimes Matthew came alone, on an occasional impulsive vacation, when Matthew might decide to head north for a weekend.
Matthew still talked about Mel occasionally, in the office—still called her his girl—but the word when he spoke it had a strange dissonance to it, as if she were in some lightless prison four continents away and might never be seen again.
Wallis had a piece of toast with jam and a cup of tea and a plate of cold salmon, then went into the spare bedroom to see if he could find the maps that Matthew had said would be there. After an hour of rooting, he found them folded in plain brown envelopes, unlabeled as to even which direction was north, and he spread them out in the hallway. He found a carton of core samples, too, and a box of loose rocks and dust—again, no labels as to what part of the valley they came from, or what depth—but it was good to be working with rock again, good to be smelling it, and he examined the chips and chunks of rock and the plugs of core samples. He spent most of the morning arranging and rearranging them in various positions on top of the blank map in such a manner as to possibly conspire to tell some story or make
some sense: as if he could construct them (as if the world below were his to construct) into structures and formations that would channel the oil into one sure and certain place, and then trap it.
Basalt, rhyolite, shale, slate; a quartzite, totally impermeable, totally hopeless for oil. A tight dolomite, but no limestone, no sandstone: nothing that he was used to.
He knew the rocks were old; just by holding them and smelling them, he could tell they were far older than anything he’d ever worked with. Some of them had to be close to a billion years old—they had no echo of life, no scent—while others had a few crude fossils. It was almost hopeless; but still, it was comforting to be handling the rock.
It was dark in the hallway, even in midday. He lit lanterns, and wondered what Mel did for money: if Matthew helped her out, or her father. Wallis didn’t have much—Old Dudley scarcely paid his geologists, saying that a geologist should hunt for the oil, not the money—though he would buy them almost anything of reason they asked for.
Wallis turned off the lanterns later in the day and lit candles. He envied Mel’s neat workplace: her clean desk, her own set of maps and journals. He kept rearranging the plugs of rock all through the day, acquainting himself with them—these tiny samples of the whole—and did not grow frustrated. He tried to keep his confidence up, though in that dimness, he could not help but start to wonder if Old Dudley had gone mad, sending him up here in November.
How to map a land that cannot be seen? The snow in the high country would not be gone for another seven months. Wallis knew Old Dudley had been near the far end of eccentric, when he’d hired Wallis over a year ago; but now he wondered if the old man were not unraveling, like the earth herself turning away from the sun in winter, shunning warmth. There was no law that said that just because Dudley was a great and cunning geologist he could not also go mad.
The cabin grew chilled—Wallis had let the fire go out. He built it back up, then fixed more tea. The sun had gone down behind the trees, though there was still the gloomy blue winter light of the forest outside; he guessed it was still daytime. He studied the pelts and skulls and antlers and bones hanging from the rafters directly above him. The long orange teeth of a beaver, like tusks, or fangs: a depth and beauty of orange he had never seen before. The cinnamon red of a marten’s pelt. Even the color black was different, up here—more glossy, and more absolute, in the bear’s pelt, and in the feathers from a raven. Wallis shook his head as if to clear it of these distractions of color—distractions which could threaten to unravel toward longing.
