Where the Sea Used to Be

by Rick Bass

  Matthew stared down the hallway: his old hallway, his old cabin. He knew he should go in after her and try to make amends for the brutishness of their arrival. He knew too he should ski back into town and let Helen know they had arrived safely.

  “You mentioned a map,” Old Dudley was saying. Wallis nodded and went to get it from the middle room, and Matthew knew Wallis would be staying.

  Wallis spread the crude map out on the floor, proud and nervous. He had constructed it almost entirely from his imagination, and the only thing he knew for certain was accurate about it were the four directions.

  It was the roughest of outlays. There were no strata delineated—only the perimeters of the valley, with some of the rivers reflecting possible fault patterns going on below, and some educated guesses about angle and direction of dip.

  Old Dudley studied the map for several minutes, implacable. Wallis waited.

  “It’s all wrong,” Dudley said finally. He picked the map up, rolled it up, and fed it to the fire. “Start over,” he said. “It’s all wrong.” The paper caught flame and lit the cabin briefly, brightly, with its burning, then was gone, blackened char, like Wallis’s face. Matthew had a slight smile—almost a smirk.

  “What parts of it were wrong?” Wallis asked. “What parts were right, so I can use them on the next map?”

  “It was all wrong,” Dudley said. “The whole fucking thing.”

  Matthew got up and went to the porch, retrieved another log, and brought it in for the fire.

  “You’re worrying about that damn car, aren’t you?” Dudley asked Matthew. “We rented it in your name and now you’re sitting there worrying about that, instead of the real matters of life, the only thing in life, the sole question, which is, Where is that oil?” Now he laid into Matthew as if beating a rented mule. “You don’t worry about that car,” he instructed. “Either that car will take care of itself or it won’t. It’s just a thing,” he said. “If you live to get old and smart like me, you’ll understand there are a lot of things in the world—that that’s all there is up top, is clutter. Shit, that’s why you couldn’t find any oil up here, even with all the chances I gave you. You either had your head up your ass, walking around looking at all the pretty flowers, or you were so hooked up, engaged, coupled with her”—Old Dudley pointed down the hall—“that you couldn’t have found oil in a service station.”

  “That’s not true,” Matthew said. “I worked my ass off. I generated—” he paused, counted on his fingers, trying to remember—“nineteen different prospects up here,” he said. “All good ones—all prospects you yourself believed in at the time.”

  Dudley ignored this as he ignored anything he did not wish to hear. “All dry holes,” he said. “Bone-dry. Blind, mindless, root-hog probing.” He shook his head, then searched his memory. “Seventeen million dollars I spent on your soft-dicked probing up here,” he said.

  “I thought money was just a thing,” Matthew said.

  “It is an indicator,” Dudley said primly, “and it indicated that you blew it. It’s a small miracle you were ever able to find oil again—a small miracle you weren’t ruined. I was able to resurrect you,” he said, and sighed, “but it took effort.”

  “These rocks,” Wallis said, hoping to break the tension between the two men. He fished some of the yellow ore from out of his pocket. “Tell me about them. Where did they come from? What do they mean? How old are they?”

  Old Dudley looked at the rocks as if they were turds, and snorted. “Fuck rocks,” he said. “I’m talking about the oil in rocks.” He snatched the rocks from Wallis, studied them briefly, then tossed them back in disgust. “They’re just pretty little rocks he picked up off the ground and probably brought home to show his sweetie.”

  Matthew took one of the rocks from Wallis, examined it, broke off a few grains, and rubbed them between his fingers. “Carnotite,” he said. “It means—”

  “Carno-fuck,” Old Dudley said. “I don’t want to hear any of that shit. It’s Christmas. Let’s don’t have any of that kind of talk.”

  Wallis gathered the rocks and put them in his cardboard box in the middle of the room. He also had half a dozen little bags of dirt—faint spoonfuls of topsoil—in his collection. What map could come from such thin supply?

  He went over to the fireplace, where the two men were talking, having made their peace. They were sharing a flask—Matthew offered it to Wallis, who took a sip and then shuddered, thinking at first that it was oil—“Absinthe,” Matthew said. Wallis asked Old Dudley how he got the scar.

  For a moment Dudley bristled, and then was very still—thinking at first that Wallis was making reference to the tong marks, which no one had ever had the temerity to ask about—but then he remembered undressing by the fire, and that Wallis had seen the scar melted across his breast, which had been for so long a part of him and hidden to others that he did not think of it as a scar.

  “When I was a child,” Dudley said, “in East Texas, living in a cabin—a hovel, really, not unlike this one—there was nothing I loved more than pumpkin pie. By God, I could eat a whole one right now. But back then, I was even crazier for them than I am now. I had to have pumpkin pie, any time I saw it. Probably some vitamin deficiency or something, living in such squalor as I was.

  “It was late on a Thanksgiving afternoon, and we were all sitting around in that dim light by the wood stove, just trying to stay warm. It had been raining for a week, so that it had turned that whole part of the country into a red sea of mud, and we had that wood stove rocking, just roaring fire-belch, as much as it could roar on that pissy green Southern yellow pine—we could not get warm—Ma, Pa, and me—and there was this pumpkin pie sitting there on top of the wood stove, a whole second pumpkin pie we hadn’t even touched, left over from the big feast. I’d already eaten one whole pie and Ma had said I couldn’t have any more til the next day, but she got up for a minute to go do something, and Pa was looking out the window at the damn rain or something, and so real quick I leaned over and reached for that pie.

  “My chair slipped and my chest pressed in against that stove,” he said. “I could feel it burning me, could smell the searing flesh—my God, it was hot: it hurt so bad. I felt like puking—but I still couldn’t quite reach that pie, so I leaned across a little farther—yow! burned the rest of my right teat off—but I got that fucking pie, and I leaned back in my chair—tears running down my face—and sat there and ate that whole damn pie, and my old man just stared at me, with his mouth hanging open—my shirt had burned open in the shape of the scar, and was still smoldering—and when Ma came back in the room, she said, ‘What’s that smell?’ Pa told her what he had just seen, and she looked at me funny, then sat down by the fire to warm herself and said, ‘Serves you right. I told you not to get that pie.’”

  Colter began to stir, as if awakened by the story. He sat up again and this time he looked and felt better, and the words he was hearing were passing through his mind at their usual pace—though in some strange way that he could not pinpoint, he missed the submerged, slower pulse of the way things had been earlier, and he tried in vain to hold onto the feeling of how it had been, as one tries upon awakening to hold onto the already disappearing clarity of a dream.

  Dudley handed the flask to Colter, who took a sip, then coughed and spat it into the fire, where it flared orange and green.

  “Good God, boy, you just spit out about a hundred dollars!” Dudley cried. “No more for you, little pup!”

  Mel came back down the hall, silent in her socks. The outside cold was seeping in between the chinks in the cabin, and the rafters continued to make groaning, twisting sounds as they contracted.

  “Greenhouse warming, my ass,” Old Dudley said, and he finished the flask.

  Mel sat down next to the fire. “You don’t know what it’s like, being your daughter,” she said. “It’s really, really hard.” She laughed, though not with humor. “Even way out here, two thousand miles away, it’s hard,” she said.


  “And even then I’ll come looking for you,” Dudley said, pleased at the show, the admission of weakness.

  “Stirring things up,” Mel said. “Rutting up the ground. Making chaos. You can’t stand it, can you—that I’m away from you?”

  Dudley smiled, looked down almost shyly, said nothing.

  “If I left the valley, you’d probably stop drilling here, wouldn’t you?” Mel asked, and again Dudley just smiled, shrugged. “You’d like to see me down in Houston, trapped by concrete and trapped in a marriage to a man”—a glance at Matthew—“who’s buried beneath the ground almost twenty-four hours a day. Why? What have you got against someone being free?”

  “You left out barefoot and pregnant,” Dudley said. “That would be good, too. Have a boy-child, maybe—someone to carry on the carnage, after I’m gone.”

  “You won’t ever be gone,” Mel said. She turned to the others. “You all think he’s joking. He’s not. He’s dead serious. He’s not joking.”

  “Mel,” Matthew said, “it’s Christmas.”

  “The hell with Christmas. The hell with all of you. You, too,” Mel said to Wallis, “this is what you bought into. I’m stuck with Pop by blood, but you chose him. God help you,” she said, and went back down the hall.

  This time Matthew went with her.

  “Well, shit, boys,” Dudley said. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “She’s been so calm,” Wallis said.

  “I guess she just doesn’t like me,” Dudley said.

  “Would you stop drilling here if she didn’t live here?” Wallis asked.

  Dudley grimaced. “Oh, son. That’s some bone-ass question. Son, son, son,” he said, shaking his head. He dropped down to all fours, and at first Wallis and Colter thought he had fallen ill. Old Dudley began crawling forward, like an old lion, slinking.

  “This is what I do to maintain my youthful figure,” he said. “It’s called creeping. It’s an exercise I invented. It tones the arms and shoulders as well as the lower abdominal muscles used in fucking,” he said. He was on the far side of the room now, his face flushed a violent red with the effort. His words were growing thicker, garbled, but he kept speaking as he crawled, wheezing through both nostrils like a horse swimming across a river; and they could hear, too, a rattling in his lungs. It seemed that he might not even make one full lap around the room.

  “It stimulates the more primitive, powerful components of the brain,” he said. He was nearing them now—prowling the perimeters. More red-faced than ever. Wallis wondered what woman could place herself beneath him, for the sex act. He would not have been surprised to see Old Dudley hoist a leg and begin peeing against one of the bookshelves.

  By the time he reached them again, he was slick with sweat, and Colter and Wallis could smell a rankness coming from him: a dense, sharp odor, as if he had come in his pants. “I do this every night,” he said. “Drunk or sober, fresh or tired—without fail. It’s helped make me the man I am.” He passed by them and began another lap, as if binding them with invisible ropes. “Fifteen minutes, every night,” he said.

  It was unsettling to watch Dudley crawling around down there at ankle-level, and Colter said, “I have to go home now, my mother will be worried”—it was 4 A.M.—and Wallis, also rattled by Old Dudley’s behavior—by the nakedness of it—didn’t try to counsel Colter otherwise, but instead primed the lantern for him and gave him an extra coat.

  “Stay away from the river,” Wallis said.

  Colter buckled on a pair of Mel’s snowshoes and took off across the starry, glassy crust. Soon he was trotting, and even after he was gone, Wallis could see the weave and wander of his lantern through the trees—the trail of light like the script of a sentence whose sole message was homesick, and Wallis allowed himself to remember his own Christmases past, both with his parents, and then later, with Susan and her grandfather—and it pleased him to see Colter hurrying home to where he belonged: pleased him to think of the joy of Colter seeing his mother’s face.

  Old Dudley crawled out onto the porch and rested there, still on all fours—sweatier than ever, steam rising from his back—and he watched the firefly trail of the lantern through the woods. He shouted out after him, “Go on, run, you little bastard—flee, you little cocksucker!”—and the sound was louder than Wallis imagined a voice could be. The sound bounced across the frozen skin of the earth like a stone skipping across water. And in the extraordinary stillness, the air was so thin and free of moisture that he could barely get enough of it into his lungs to breathe, even when he drew a double lungful.

  Up on the mountain behind them, the wolves began to answer. “Holy shit, let’s get inside quick,” Dudley said, crawling back inside. “Lock that door,” he ordered. He resumed his creeping. “Do you think they’ll get that salamander-boy?” he asked.

  Wallis didn’t answer, but instead prepared an elk-hide pallet by the fire. He turned out the lamps, exhausted. He could feel the earth below him spinning in one rhythm, and at one speed—winter—while he above was moving much faster, in step with neither the time of year nor the place.

  Old Dudley kept creeping. Wallis could tell where he was by the sounds of his huffing and puffing, and by the way the floor would creak whenever Dudley passed by, and by the damp, dank odor of him, like mushrooms in a shady forest—and after a while, he heard Dudley collapse in a heap at the base of the couch, then heard him climb up onto the couch, where there was the rustling of hides and blankets as he covered himself for sleep, like some creature crawling back into its burrow: though even then, in the quietness, there was still the rankness, the odor of him, which kept blossoming from him as he slept, like some flower blooming in the night. Wallis’s last thought was of how someone as precise and understated—as watchful—as Mel could have come directly out of such a rutting old boar as Dudley.

  Dudley was staring at Wallis when he awoke. It was daylight, midmorning, and still snowing, and he was standing a few feet away, just watching him. The fire had gone out and the cabin was cold. The blossoming odor was gone.

  “Listen,” Dudley said, and pointed down the hall. “Do you think they’re coupled?” he asked. “Do you think they’re hooked up?”

  “I’d rather not—” Wallis started to say, but then the sounds began, the sounds that had awakened Dudley. “Listen,” Dudley said. He crouched a bit, as one might crouch in the woods, listening to the approach of a deer. “Does it sound like mouth-fucking to you?” he asked. He started to say something else, something unguarded, but stopped and eyed Wallis differently.

  “You’re vile,” Wallis said.

  “Well, yes,” Dudley said. “America is vile. These are vile, hungry times. People are hungry for my oil and gas without even knowing they’re hungry for it. And you work for me, and you find it, so you’re vile, too. We’re all vile.” He sat down, his feelings clearly hurt.

  “Don’t tell me you haven’t been with her yourself,” he said. “I can smell it on you.”

  Wallis went into the kitchen and busied himself lighting the wood stove.

  Old Dudley followed him. “You’ve been with her, right?”

  “No,” Wallis said.

  The headboard was bumping against the wall of the cabin now. Dudley grinned hugely.

  “You’re different than you were in Houston,” Wallis said, and Dudley shook his head.

  “I’m different from how you chose to view me,” he said. “You just weren’t seeing clearly. You didn’t want to see. Anyway,” he said, “how I am has nothing to do with below, does it?”

  “No,” Wallis admitted, “not really.”

  There were more rustlings in the bedroom.

  “You wouldn’t know where I can get me some, would you?” Dudley asked. Wallis pretended not to know what he was talking about. “No, I don’t guess you would,” he said. He left the kitchen then, as if to be alone in his disappointment, or as if Wallis’s prudery were contagious. He went to the fireplace and tried to get a fire going. Wal
lis began mixing pancake batter, and watched him. He was doing it all wrong—stacking green chunky logs on top of each other without any kindling, and without any air, and he kept lighting matches and holding them against the big chunks of wood until the matches burned down. He singed his fingers and he cursed and flapped his hands, then tried again.

  Dudley continued to curse, and, finally admitting failure, came back into the kitchen, where he moved in close to the wood stove. He proceeded to tell Wallis all of the things he intended to do when next he did find someone.

  Now the sounds from the bedroom were coming in a different rhythm. Old Dudley cocked his head like the RCA dog and ventured back into the other room, to better formulate a theory—and Wallis wanted space, more space from this craziness, or if it wasn’t craziness, from this hunger.

  The sounds stopped, then—the musical rumba of the bed frame having finished things off—and Old Dudley leered at Wallis. He said, “Sometimes I forget he’s not my son—sometimes he seems more my son than she does my daughter.”

  Though the odor of Dudley’s creeping from the night before was gone, Wallis needed fresh air. He went down to the creek to haul water to heat for baths. When he came back, Mel and Matthew had joined Dudley at the table and things were calmer. Mel seemed willing, always willing, to give Dudley another chance—and as if playing cat-and-mouse, Dudley was willing to take it. It seemed to Wallis that if she were going to disown him, surely she would have done so by now.

  She was wearing an old white terrycloth robe, her hair was brushed, and she was smiling. Wallis saw for the first time that she was not simply attractive, but beautiful, and marveled that in the depth of his funk or numbness he had missed it, after a month of living with her.

  She thanked him for bringing the water in and began making pancakes for breakfast. Wallis went out for more water, again and again. Old Dudley and Matthew sat at the table and talked about oil and gas. Wallis wanted to listen—was crazy to listen, after so long a silence, a separation from it—but the water needed to be hauled. He wore his path deeper and deeper—a rut, a tunnel—with each passage. He wondered how many trips Matthew had made up and down this same path. He wondered where it had all gone: all the water Matthew had hauled, all the trails cut deep into the snow and ice, and all the love he’d had for Mel.