Where the Sea Used to Be

by Rick Bass

  When he brought the last of the water in, everyone was seated at the table. Matthew and Mel were waiting for him to join them; Old Dudley had forged ahead, had spread maple syrup and huckleberry jam thick across his pancakes and was chowing down, making the most awful smacking noises. Matthew and Mel were holding hands but Wallis knew that there remained between them only the thinnest threads of a bond, that it was only an echo of what once had been.

  As if reading this thought, Old Dudley finished one pancake, paused for a swig of milk (into which he’d poured a dollop of rum), and said to Wallis, “You’ve got to dive, boy—I’m telling you, you’re going to jack around up here at the surface and get stranded—you’ve got to turn loose of, and ignore, all this bullshit.” Dudley waved his hands at everything in the cabin—the books, the antlers, the fireplace, and lastly, Mel.

  Mel stared at him for a moment but said nothing, having decided to let him stew in his own vapors. She would try to salvage what she could of the day and ignore him, though she knew that after a while it would be like trying to ignore a dog turd in the middle of the floor.

  There was a tapping at the window: a small face appeared, cuphanded, and they thought it was Colter again, but saw then that it was Helen.

  “Aww, shit,” Matthew said, “are her feelings going to be hurt, or what?” He got up and hurried to the door to let her in. He hugged her and said, “Merry Christmas, Ma.” She was holding an armload of wrapped presents—small, bright boxes she’d brought over in her pack—and she smiled uncertainly and stepped in, confused by the sight of a table-setting that did not include her. Mel jumped up and fixed a plate for her, poured her a cup of coffee in her one good china cup.

  “I got up and looked out my window and saw the two of you drive through town,” she said. “In that long black car, gliding across the snow. I thought it was a dream and I went back to sleep. But in the morning I saw the tracks. I waited for a while, thinking you’d be coming over for breakfast, but then I came on over. I saw where the car went through the snow. I guess that’s why y’all couldn’t get back over to the mercantile,” she said, though she knew full well that Matthew, even the city-husk of him, could have skied or snowshoed back to town easily.

  “We were just about to head over there,” Matthew said. “Right after we finished breakfast, and right after we took our baths.”

  The silence following any lie, or half-truth.

  “Here,” Helen said, handing them each a gift. “Merry Christmas.”

  “Oh, Helen,” Mel said, “you do this every year, and we ask you not to. We didn’t get anything for anyone. We just eat, and visit, and hang out . . .

  “I don’t want anything,” Helen said. “I just wanted to give y’all a little something. If it’s that uncomfortable for you, next year I can bring them over the day before Christmas, or the day after. But it makes me happy. You don’t have to give me anything. Please open them.”

  They peeled off the hand-painted wrapping paper. Four tiny deer hide pouches, soft and thin, and smelling of wood smoke. Wallis’s eyes stung with the pleasure of being included. They opened their drawstring pouches—each small enough to be held in the palm of a hand.

  A river stone, smooth and polished as an agate, for Wallis.

  A handful of porcupine quills for Mel, beautiful as ivory, each one nearly weightless and perfect for the duty for which it had been crafted: defense.

  An eagle’s talon, gnarled and dried but razor-sharp, for Old Dudley.

  An old silver pocketwatch for Matthew. He held it, studied it, wanting to know—he looked inquiringly at Helen—and she said, “Yes, I think so.”

  Matthew held it to his face to smell the odor of it—tarnished silver, ancient silver—and to glean the echoes of any memories that might be emanating from it.

  “I think so too,” said Matthew. “How did you find it?”

  “Amy found it, when she was going through some of Zeke’s things,” Helen said. “She remembered that Zeke’s father used to hang out with your father a lot, when they were younger—they used to go bird hunting together a lot—and after Buster died, the watch must have somehow gone to Zeke’s father, and after that, to Zeke. I guess after that it would have gone to Colter,” Helen said. “It was awfully sweet of Amy to think of it.”

  “Amy,” said Old Dudley, fingering the tips of the eagle’s claws: the ankle as bright a yellow as an ear of corn. “She’s the one with the nice bumcakes, right?”

  They ignored him. Matthew pressed the smoothness of the watch to his face, and closed his eyes for a moment.

  “It doesn’t work anymore, of course,” Helen said. “But maybe you could get it fixed somewhere.”

  Matthew opened his eyes, but she saw that he was not seeing her, or anyone, or anything. Helen wondered if after she was gone, he would ever hold anything of hers that tightly to him.

  A thing like a scar, a crescent of pain, ran through her center, from her waist and across her chest. She flinched at the tightness of it—the illogical pain of sorrow amidst joy—and tried to relax, tried to tell herself that it didn’t matter; that the good fortune was hers for having known and loved him, for having been able to raise him in his parents’ stead. The fact that she might be forgotten, dust, the moment she stepped off the earth, did not matter.

  Mel got up and hugged Helen, thanking her again. Old Dudley made a childish, clawing motion at the air with his eagle talon, of which he was clearly proud. “I’d get up and thank you,” he said, “but I’ve got a king-sized boner, thinking about Amy. You wouldn’t want to see it. It would shock and amaze you,” he said.

  “Thank you,” Helen said. “Please stay seated.”

  Wallis fingered his river stone: worn and abraded smooth. It fit the palm of his hand, and the space below his ear, where his jaw hinged. He pressed it here and there, as Matthew had done with his father’s watch, and said thank you to Helen.

  “Let me see that old thing,” Dudley said to Matthew, reaching across the table for the watch. Matthew handed it to him. “Careful,” Matthew said, as if speaking to a child—but Old Dudley was reckless with it, opening the lid and shaking it and holding it to his ear, then shaking it again, rough as a primate. The watch slipped from his hands.

  Wallis had been watching, anticipating; he dived for the falling watch, lunged from his chair, and caught it in one hand just before it hit the ground, while the rest of them sat petrified, waiting to hear the sound of its breaking. There was a nauseating silence, as all their adrenaline resettled, and Old Dudley chuckled, a heh-heh kind of chuckle, and said, “Good catch.” Wallis handed the watch back to Matthew.

  They went into town that afternoon, after they had all bathed, taking turns in only six inches of hot water in the big tub, changing the water each time; and when they went out on their skis, their hair was still damp, and it froze around their skulls like helmets, and their skin contracted, stretched tighter to take the wrinkles and crow’s-feet from their faces, and made them all feel younger as they skied. They skied in single file, and when they passed the limousine they saw that it had sunk a little farther, as the temperatures had warmed slightly.

  The breeze was at their backs now, from the south, and to the south they could see a high wall of purple clouds, another snowstorm coming in, squeezing in again over the same pass through which such storms had passed for thousands of years—coming through the notch of Gunsight Mountain—and then being channeled along the river, flanked between the high mountains on either side. Dumping snow every time as if to bury the valley, either because it was too beautiful to be seen by the world, or as if in punishment for some evil long-forgotten. Always the storms took the same path.

  When they got to town, the Red Dog was full, overflowing; despite the cold, the door was open, and people lounged on the porch dressed in heavy quilted coveralls and wrapped in fur robes. Heat from the stove trickled out the door for a short distance like spilled water. A few horses were tied to the porch rail, where they stood with heads d
own, snow-matted, dreaming of, hungering toward, their next feeding of hay, while other horses wandered loose and milled around the porch, even took the first few tentative steps up onto it—feeling that warm air from the open door trickling around their ankles—and it seemed that they were considering going into the bar, and it seemed also from the degree of inebriation of those on the porch that the horses might be welcome to do so.

  Old Dudley did not get into the valley often, and when he did, he delighted in buying drinks for the house, all day or all night—for however long he was in the bar. He enjoyed being around the savages, as he called them. For a few hundred dollars he could afford to buy them all drinks for days on end, if he wished—as if they were fish in an aquarium that had gathered for him to observe, as he fed them—and they in turn were delighted to be able to examine him. They found him more savage and fascinating than any creature in the woods, and their response to him was a strange mixture of respect and ridicule. He was clearly talented at what he did—how else could he have earned so much money?—and understood the subterranean workings of the earth far more intimately and in more specific detail than they could ever imagine. But of his oil-finding ability, all they knew was what they had seen, which was that he had thus far failed nineteen times in their valley. Some worried that he might soon stop coming to the valley if it didn’t soon produce something for him. Such was their economy that he could spend two hundred dollars in an evening and six months later, a hundred and fifty of it would still be in the valley.

  When the rigs came, there was very little money that went into the valley directly—the payments instead went to outside contractors, and the trucks involved in the hauling of equipment were run by outsiders, as were the crews involved in the drilling—but the spectacle of the operation, surreal and monstrous—the rig towering up with the trees; the clanging and hissing and roaring of motors—brought some entertainment to the valley, during the long, lazy two months of summer; and occasionally, one of the rig workers would buy a pack of crackers or a can of sardines from the mercantile; and they patronized the bar as well, though not with the enthusiasm that might be expected, so tired were they from the day’s or night’s work. They lived in a squalid tent camp down by the river, when they came, and bathed in the river and killed deer out of season, does with fawns, and cooked them continuously over large sprawling ragged fires down by water’s edge; and each spring, after they were gone, the high water of runoff scoured away their leavings.

  As with anything of this nature, the valley was somewhat divided on the issue of whether the drilling was a good thing or a bad thing; but it was always a dry hole, and the rigs always went away, and the quiet, the peace, always returned, like vegetation growing back in over a scratched-bare spot, or like a scar knitting flesh back together.

  So they welcomed Dudley as a pack of dogs welcome one of their own: everyone rising and coming up to touch him—to shake his hand or pat his back or grip his shoulder—and they welcomed Matthew with even greater zeal—as if he were some kind of prodigal, Wallis noted—and with some large measure of relief, too, as if there had been a collective fear among them that one day he would not come back.

  And Wallis could feel it, as if he were already one of the locals: a settling or shifting of things—of the entire valley, is what it felt like—so that things seemed to fit once more as they had, and in a manner around which other things had been designed or adjusted.

  Mel, Wallis, and Helen hung back, accepted a few greetings, filtered into the crowd. There were the usual odors of smoke, alcohol, sweat, and adrenaline; but mixed in with it were the buffering odors of fir and spruce sap, snow, and horses.

  Dudley pulled out a wad of hundred-dollar bills, the stack of them as thick as a big hamburger, put two down on the counter, rang the cowbell to announce the free drinks, and a cheer went up.

  People kept swarming around the two men, kept touching Matthew, as if to see if he were still real, after so long down in the city.

  Wallis sat at a back table with Helen and Mel and watched the snow come down. The sight of it was utterly hypnotic. Wallis felt as if he were viewing the white noise in his own mind; that the snow was passing through his mind and cleansing it with its passage. It did not seem to matter that he was working for a buffoon.

  “Remember,” Mel said—her voice startled him—“one drink. Make it last.”

  Wallis smiled. “Maybe two, since it’s Christmas.”

  “Not me,” said Mel. “Just one for me.”

  Danny came over and joined them, as did Amy and Colter. Colter was wearing a new necklace of shining teeth on a deer hide thong, and everyone exclaimed over it: another find from Zeke’s tanning shed. Mel leaned in and touched each tooth, named them as she touched them. Grizzly, coyote, wolf, beaver. The ivory eyeteeth, little hidden tusks, of elk. Lion. Badger.

  “My word,” Mel said, “I had no idea.” She could barely speak. Her hand lingered on the necklace. “It’s so beautiful.” She was quiet for a long moment. “What does it feel like, to have it on your chest?”

  “It feels good,” Colter said. He started to take it off to let her try it on.

  “No,” said Mel, “it’s yours—your father’s.”

  “Well,” said Colter, “it feels good.”

  “I imagine it does,” said Mel.

  Old Dudley had purchased a bottle of rum and had climbed up on the counter and was proclaiming loudly about something, they couldn’t hear what—clearly using up air space to keep people from paying too much attention to Matthew. Gusts of snow blew in through the open doorway, but no one made a move to get up and shut the door.

  Amy poured beer for everyone at their table except for Colter; emptied the pitcher. A look of pleasure, even contentment in her eyes, despite the recent loss of her husband. She smelled the empty pitcher and closed her eyes: remembered growing up in Pennsylvania, her father and six brothers drinking beer at lunch, at supper: remembered them drinking it like water as they plowed and broke the black soil. When a horse went lame or needed resting, one of the brothers, each over six feet tall and weighing more than three hundred pounds, would step into the traces and pull until the horse healed.

  “Were you born here,” Wallis asked Danny, “or did you come from someplace else?” It seemed to him that hardly anyone—Helen, Matthew, and maybe a couple of others—had been born here. As if it were instead only a place to come to.

  Danny smiled sadly, realizing for the first time that Wallis could not possibly know his circumstances: that it had not been gotten by osmosis.

  “I came here in grief,” he said. “A place to start over. From Florida. I was a bronc rider.” He peered at Wallis sidelong. “Do you want to know the specifics?”

  It seemed rude to say no; it seemed salacious to say yes.

  “People around me were getting sick,” Danny said. “My wife, my old parents—my wife’s kids from an earlier marriage. She was pregnant with our first.

  “They started dying—some fast, like my old man, with his heart attack—but others, real slow. Cancers and such. Right before my wife died—the baby was never born—her old mother told me it was my fault, that it was a curse—that I was not living a path of righteousness, that I was being cursed for being away from home too much. No offense,” Danny said, with a glance at Amy, “but she was a big churchgoer.” He shook his head, though how many times in the twenty years since had he told the story? Laying it down each time like a foundation, like steppingstones across some dark river.

  “She even got my wife thinking that way, before she died,” Danny said. “Funny thing was, it probably was my fault, unintentionally; there was probably some damn nuclear waste in the soil, or invisible night fumes from some refinery that settled where we were living. People in that neighborhood were always getting sick, and I couldn’t afford to move us to a better location; or I didn’t think I could. And we had a good time,” he said. “We had a good life. But after that, I lost it. After the funeral—five of them in
two years—her old momma kept hounding me, kept after me like some little dickey bird chasing an owl. I was drinking and doing drugs, and one day she came over there to yap in my face—damn near crazy herself—and I hit her.” Danny looked Wallis straight in the face. “I hit her hard. I went ape-shit. They had to put her in the hospital. I’ve never been sorrier for anything in my life.

  “I did my three years, then came out here. I didn’t even know ‘out here’ was here; I just headed this way, and stopped when I realized this was where I needed to be.

  “The day I got out of jail, her old husband—Lucinda’s stepfather—was waiting for me with a gun—a little pissant Saturday night special. I got off the bus in town and he was waiting there for me, and shot me with it, but the pistol blew up in his hand,” Danny said. “Some of the bullet went into me—went right through my ribs—and some of the gun shrapnel cut up his hand. There was a lot of blood.

  “I didn’t say a damn thing,” Danny said. “I took off my shirt and wrapped up what was left of his hand in it, took him down the street to a doctor’s office, checked him in—blood was coming out of my ribs at a pretty good clip—and I just kept on going. I knew the battery in my old truck would be dead, so I bought a new one, and walked home with it. It was August, about a hundred degrees, and the heat and blood loss was making me dizzy. I got home, drank about a gallon of water straight from the garden hose—swapped batteries, hosed myself off in the front yard, slept til dusk beneath a shade tree, then woke up and got in my truck and headed out.