Where the Sea Used to Be

by Rick Bass

  In town, Wallis was greeted like a long-lost resident—like some hermit who had not been seen in years—and the afternoon’s gathering at the bar fell upon him with great hunger and friendliness. He saw Danny, and black-bearded Charlie, and Artie, the bartender; but there were others, too, their faces as unfamiliar to him as the words of a foreign language, and Wallis felt awkward, not just as if unknowledge-able about the local customs of this place, but worse: as if he were incapable, and even undesirous, of learning. As if he had been asleep for twenty years.

  “You look a little shaggier than when you got here,” Danny said, grinning, and Artie handed him a bourbon, which was the color of dark honey. Wallis wondered what would happen if the bar ran out of whiskey: if there was, one year, not enough to make it through the winter.

  “What’ve you been up to?” Artie asked. “Is Mel teaching you anything?”

  Wallis smiled and said, “She hasn’t wanted to have much to do with me lately,” and Danny and Artie laughed, seeming relieved.

  “Finding any oil?” Charlie asked.

  Wallis grimaced, shrugged. “How?” he asked, waving out at the dim blue portals of window light. The whiskey was hot. He felt as if he had traveled farther than seven miles.

  The men laughed. “Welcome to the winter, buddy,” Danny said, clapping a hand on his shoulder. “Welcome to the winter.”

  A woman and her child sat at one of the tables, the woman drinking beer steadily from a mug, and the child, a boy, staring off at some distant but intriguing nothingness. The boy looked to be about twelve or thirteen; the woman, a few years on either side of forty, though not in any way that reminded Wallis of Mel. This woman looked if not used up, then close to it. She looked cautious; as if, in addition to having all of her chores set out before her, she knew also precisely how much energy she had remaining to accomplish those tasks, and that the tasks and the energy required were rarely to either the debit or excess of one another; that she had to be prudent and frugal, even cunning, to get things done each day and still be upright, come day’s end.

  It was not at all the way Mel did things, Wallis thought. She planned nothing, calculated nothing, gave nothing her forbearance. She simply pinned her ears back and went.

  Now Wallis saw that the woman was older: forty-five, perhaps. He knew he had no basis for such imagining, but it seemed to him that she had run out of steam only recently. Even watching her, he could feel his own energy draining.

  “That’s Amy,” Danny said, “and her boy, Colter. Her husband, Zeke, died last spring. He went through the ice,” Danny said. “He was a trapper. You can still see him down there,” he said, and at first Wallis thought Danny meant you could see Zeke’s likeness in the face of the boy. “He’s only about twenty feet down,” Danny said, speaking quietly beneath the noise of the bar. “The water is as clear as gin, cold as hell. Everything’s still the same on him, same as it was the day he went in. He’s got his arms raised up like this”—Danny demonstrated, as if signaling a touchdown—“and his hair is still waving in the current, black as his over there”—he pointed to Colter—“only longer. It kept growing after he died.”

  Artie got up and brought more drinks for the two men. It was amazing, Wallis thought, sipping his second, how one drink, one fire in the stove, one story, could keep the whole awful weight of winter at bay. He felt badly for not having come down to the bar earlier: a hermit, even in a valley of hermits; an island, even among islands.

  “He should have known better,” Danny said. “He should have crossed on thicker ice, or farther upstream, where there wasn’t any ice, but where he could have waded. It must have been late, right at dark. He must have been in a hurry to get home to his family. His traps must have weighed him down.”

  “We guess he’s still down there,” Artie said. “Least he was a couple of weeks ago, before the river started to freeze up. We won’t know til spring, now. But he was still there, last we saw of him.”

  “Why didn’t they pull him out and bury him in the ground?” Wallis asked.

  Artie shrugged. He had a loud, clear voice, as if unaware of its timbre. “Said she liked to still be able to see him now and again. Said she didn’t want her or the boy to forget what he looked like.”

  “They’ve built a kind of a cairn down there,” Danny said. “They’ve put it at the edge of the river, with stones and skulls and antlers and feathers and things—but there’s one in the river, too. They toss in rocks and antlers to pile up next to him. His old traps. Stuff like that. A lot of time the river sweeps those things away, but he’s still there. Or was. Got his boot tangled in the crotch of a sunken cottonwood limb.”

  “You can see the white marks on the bark, where he tried to cut free with his knife,” Artie said.

  “He ran out of time,” Danny said.

  They went over to sit with Amy and Colter, and to introduce Wallis. Amy was not drunk, nor was she drinking as if in sorrow; but nonetheless, she was putting the beer away, despite not being very large. Artie went to get her another pitcher, and Wallis saw that it was more like a meal for her than grieving. She wanted to be around people, and that was what one did in a bar: drank.

  He saw too that the boy, Colter, had some interior shine—saw it perhaps the way Old Dudley had seen it in Wallis. Wallis and Colter stared at each other for a moment after being introduced, and Wallis saw the hunger in Colter’s eyes then, saw the boy’s loneliness at being trapped, stranded, unable to get to his father.

  “You’re living with Mel,” Amy said.

  “I’m staying in her cabin,” Wallis said.

  “Did you used to go to a church, down in Texas?” Amy asked. She had a small, quiet, kind voice, and Wallis had trouble picturing her as a trapper’s wife; though he was not sure, either, what he would have imagined.

  Wallis thought for a moment. “My parents did,” he said, “a long time ago. But they died—Mom first, and then my father. He stopped going when I was still young.”

  Wallis paused, perilously close to the old debris of story that was of no use to him anymore: moving in with Susan and her old grandfather. A new love, a new life back then—like climbing up out of some horrible pit.

  “Amy used to want to get a church going up here,” Danny explained.

  “Were you a missionary?” Wallis asked.

  “No,” Amy said, twisting her beer mug. “I just wanted a church.”

  “It didn’t work out,” Artie said. “No one would come. Everyone was always out hunting, or cutting wood, or gardening, or something.”

  “Do you mind my asking,” Wallis said, “what—”

  “I tan hides,” Amy said. “The hides Mel uses for her maps.” She looked under the table, nodded at the moccasins Danny was wearing, and at some of the jackets hanging on hooks by the door. “Those shoes, those shirts—when people kill a deer or elk, I tan and sew the hides for them.” Her voice, despite the beer, was clear and calm. As if it were she who was passing across ice of unknown or suspect thickness. “He looks for antlers,” she said, nodding to Colter. “We box them up and ship them to stores. We get by,” she said, “just as good as we did when he was still living.”

  “You’re a tailor,” Wallis said.

  “Yes,” Amy said, after thinking for a moment, “that’s a nice word. I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

  A third bourbon for Wallis. The winter fell back further. He saw Helen come in, heard the rouse and chorus of greetings.

  “I used to be in the choir, in Pennsylvania,” Amy was saying. “We sang on Sundays. We practiced three times a week.”

  “You can’t bring that with you,” Artie counseled. “You can’t bring anything with you. Everything’s new, up here. You’ve go to start all over.”

  Amy nodded. Wallis felt winter creep in a few feet closer in the silence.

  Another bourbon. “How long have you been up here?” Wallis asked.

  “Twenty-five years,” Amy said. “Sometimes it seems like yesterday; other days, like
another lifetime.” She reached over and touched her son’s face. “I’m glad he’s getting a chance to grow up here,” she said. “He’s everything,” she said, “everything, now.”

  Charlie was cooking more venison on the stove: they could smell it. A strange somber blue wave seemed to have passed through the bar while Amy had been speaking, and for a little while the bar was hushed, as if waiting for the wave to pass over; but now with the scent of venison people’s spirits surged again, and they began wandering over to the stove to pick tidbits from the iron skillet, the meat disappearing quickly in this manner, all mouths chewing, and when Wallis asked Danny how much of his deer was left, Danny said that was almost the last of it.

  Wallis took a drink over to the wall of photos and looked at them again, in closer detail. The photos were mostly of Matthew-this and Matthew-that—Matthew around seventeen or eighteen, he guessed, holding a giant sturgeon from the river, the fish longer than Matthew was tall; and an even younger picture—sixteen?—holding up three enormous swans—and another of Matthew younger yet: thirteen or fourteen, working on that rock wall, wrestling squarish ice-cracked boulders into place like a prisoner on work detail.

  Wallis studied these pictures briefly, then moved on to others: dusty, grainy photos of the whole valley carrying stones up and down the road, and of men shirtless in overalls with straw hats to block the sun, busting boulders with chisel and sledge to make them fit just right.

  A photo of the bar itself, looking no different then than now. In that photo, a recently killed bull elk hung from the porch rafters, and snow was falling. The men had mustaches, and though it was a black and white photo, they appeared to have that tone or color of hazel eyes that is rarely seen anymore. Someone’s dog—thirty years gone, now—sat young and proud, staring expectantly at the camera.

  And where were the photos of the photographer, Wallis wondered—of Matthew’s father? There were none. You would have to look at Matthew to catch a glimpse of him, in certain lights and at certain times. That was all that was left. Wallis thought back to his own father—liver cirrhosis when Wallis was fourteen—and to his mother, whose heart stopped, stopping like a clock that one day does not get wound, when he was eight—a child’s memories of her, instead of a man’s—and Wallis wondered how he would have been different if he’d grown up in this part of the world.

  Wallis wondered if he would have participated just as deeply in the seasonal hunting and gathering—the killing, the taking—as well as in the fragmenting of stone. The men (and there were some women in the photos; women hauling stones, women pushing wheelbarrows full of stones) seeming—in those photographs, at least—to possess a peace and steadiness, which, like those strange hazel eyes, was not seen much anymore.

  How much of a man, or a woman, was shaped by his blood, and how much by a place: the blood forming the infant but then the land beginning its own carving at child’s birth?

  And how much do we carve at and upon each other? Certainly Old Dudley had, in only twenty years, very nearly finished what could almost be considered a clone of his awful self, from the raw material of Matthew: seizing upon the similarities and chiseling away all differences . . .

  Wallis walked farther down the hall, his glass empty. Pictures of Helen as a young woman in a canoe on the river—the trees behind her looking only slightly smaller and younger.

  This was a little what it was like, looking for oil and gas. Going down, farther down and back—sheets of time falling away in layers, with the newest resting atop the oldest. His affinity for this kind of searching must always have resided in his blood. No man, and no landscape, could have instructed him in that pleasure. It was too deep, too certain. Surely he had brought that pleasure with him into the world.

  Helen came over to where he was standing. Wallis was swaying slightly, but Helen had another drink for him, and she steadied him.

  “He loved that camera,” she said, speaking of Matthew’s father. “He and his wife never had any money to spare. He always wanted to take lots of pictures, but he only allowed himself one a week. Sometimes, on special occasions, two. He’d send the roll of film off to Helena to get it developed. Everyone in the valley would have to wait a couple of weeks for the photos to come back—him checking the mail every day, having been sleepless all night, he said—and when the pictures came, he’d lay them out on the floor of the bar and study them for what seemed like forever.

  “And when he died, I gave the camera to Danny, who now takes only three or four pictures a year.” Helen’s voice was hoarse and gravelly. She moved down the hall, squinting in the dim light through her thick glasses. A lit cigarette dangled from her mouth. “Here,” she said, “here, I think, is where Buster left off and Danny picked up.”

  Buster’s last photo, a close-up, had been of a pattern of lichens on gray stone, up in the high country. There were tufts of alpine bracken clinging to the rocks, and some fresh blown snow. “He was out on Robinson Mountain, in October,” Helen said. She pointed to the snow in the picture. “A storm came in that afternoon, and he got wet and caught the pneumonia that killed him. He could have beaten it, but he just quit.” She drew hard on her cigarette, frowned, trying her best to remember something important. Released the blue smoke from her mouth and then from both nostrils. “I can’t remember if he ever saw this picture or not,” she said. “Seems like maybe he didn’t.” She shook her head, surprised by the memory of the sadness she had felt back then—so distant and without substance, now. As if she had somehow not been justified in feeling it so deeply, for it to all be gone now.

  “How old was Matthew?” Wallis asked.

  “Little,” Helen said. “Four.”

  “It’s amazing,” Wallis said. “You really can’t tell where one left off and the other picked up.”

  Helen laughed, stubbed out her cigarette. “It’s a good camera,” she said. “Cost a pretty penny, even then.”

  Wallis headed back to his table, bumping one table with his hips, and then another. Made it back to his chair just in time, before his legs went out: all power draining from him, except for that required to lift another glass to his lips.

  “The caribou,” Colter said, and Wallis thought he meant something that was cooking on the stove—but everyone was rising and moving over toward the windows. Wallis followed them to the front door, still unsteady.

  The caribou had their faces pressed against the glass of the windows—big bulging eyes, with long white manes and beards that made them look like circus creatures. As they tried to peer in, the windows would fog, then clear, then fog, then clear, with each breath, so that the caribou’s faces were visible only in shuttered pulses, like the awkward frames from an old motion picture. Everyone went out onto the porch to marvel at their strange and magnificent antlers.

  “They come down from Canada sometimes,” Helen said. “You hardly ever see them anymore. They’re damn near extinct. Woodland caribou,” she said. “The kids are all certain they’re reindeer.”

  Wallis counted twelve of them. They milled around like horses bunched together for warmth. There was snow on their backs, and when one caribou’s antlers brushed against another’s, there was a dull clacking sound like the music of rocks tumbling downstream under heavy water. “We just see them in the snowiest winters,” Helen said. “I guess it’s going to be a corker.”

  “Do they always come here?” Wallis asked. “To the bar?” It seemed to him that they were like strangers checking into town.

  “Always,” said Helen. “They’re so damn tame. We may or may not see them again this year. I think they just come by to check in on things, and to let us know they’re around. They’ll disappear after this. Look,” she said, and pointed to Colter, who was feeding one of them an apple. “It’s an omen,” said Helen.

  “Of what?” Wallis asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Helen. “But it’s an omen.”

  The caribou—a bull—finished his apple, and all the caribou stared at the people a little
longer, and the people stared at the caribou, and then the caribou turned, as if having heard some unspoken command, and headed back up the road. They soon disappeared into the falling snow.

  “They’ll go to the peaks of the mountains,” Helen said. “The more snow, the better. They’ve got those big feet, so that they just float on top of the snow. They reach up and eat lichens from the tops of trees. They need all the snow in the world.”

  When the caribou were gone, everyone turned and went inside. Already, in that brief time, their hats and backs and shoulders were covered with snow. Colter put on his coat and told Amy that he was going to follow the caribou on his skis for a short while.

  “He’s like a little Indian,” Amy said, after he was gone. “He’s like his father.”

  The cold had sobered everyone—or made them believe, for a moment, that they were sober—and so more drinks were ordered. Now Wallis felt himself wobbling, felt his interior self diving, and was relaxed: this was sometimes how it was, at depth, mapping. A free fall, with no struggling against one’s plummet.

  Mel came in the bar, snowy and steaming. She shook the snow from her hair and clothes, knocked it from her boots, and began unpeeling. She too was greeted with great joy and warmth, and it was some time before she could separate herself from conversations and come over to Wallis’s table, where, upon seeing his condition—lights out—she asked him how many drinks he’d had.

  He barely heard her telling him—instructing him, almost commanding him—to never again have more than one drink in winter.

  “Your blood’s too sluggish, and your brain shrinks, same as it does for bears in hibernation. If you drink even two, then it’s all over—you can’t stop. Two’s the same as five or six, seven or eight. How many did you have?”

  Wallis made a dim attempt at answering. Artie and Danny tried to cut him some slack—they weren’t in much better shape themselves—but were silenced by Mel’s glare, and they made excuses to leave the table and find other things that needed doing. Mel frowned, nodded at Amy’s empty pitcher and Helen’s near-empty shot glass. “Y’all know how it is up here, in winter—he doesn’t. That wasn’t fair,” she said.