Where the Sea Used to Be

by Rick Bass

  “I still don’t feel like I paid my dues or debts,” Danny said, staring at his hands. “It’s not like I feel absolved or anything. I guess it just feels like that was then and this is now.”

  Wallis held the story for a while. “Were you a good bronco rider?” he asked, finally.

  “Naw,” Danny said, “that’s the hell of it. I wasn’t worth a damn, really. I just enjoyed it, was all.”

  “Do you think back to it much?” Wallis asked.

  “Nah. Probably no more than once or twice a day now. Not like what I used to.”

  Up on the counter, Old Dudley had rung the bell again and had rolled up a piece of posterboard to form a sort of megaphone. He was braying about his hawks and eagles, shouting their story so loudly that there was no way anyone else could have told another story anyway.

  He was talking about when he had first started looking for oil and gas—when he and his wife and Mel, just a baby, had been living out in West Texas. They rented a little one-bedroom, one-bath adobe house for thirty-five dollars a month. There were hawks and eagles all around the house—the newspapers on the floor had to be changed daily—and when Old Dudley went out into the oil fields, he would take his hawks with him, to train, while the rig drilled almost ceaselessly deeper. It was long, slow work, waiting for the well to reach its final destination. All the craft had been expended in preparing the prospect for drilling—in creating the map—and then it would be expended again, interpreting the results once the well was finished—taking the data and altering and revising those maps—but during the in-between time there was just a lot of straight-ahead drilling, and it was Dudley’s job back then to simply be within rough shouting distance should something occur.

  As he lectured, his voice boomed across the bar. No one could do anything but listen.

  “I remember being out dawn til dusk some days,” he was saying. “I’d hunt six birds in a day. I’d keep ’em hot and fresh. And when I wasn’t hunting the old one, I’d be training the young ones. I was a good trainer. You have to start when the birds are little. They’re too wild at first—they don’t want to do what you ask of them—they kill, but by nature they don’t want to bring back what they kill and hand it over to you—and so you have to forge this bond. You have to alter their nature.

  “The simplest way, when you’ve got ’em young like that, is to just wear the fuckers out,” he said. “You keep ’em awake—you stay awake, too, with them—for however long it takes to wear them out: three, four, five days in a row, day and night.

  “Every time the bird tries to rest, you wake it back up—sometimes you even devil it a bit—and it flies at you in a rage, screeching and clawing. You have to wear a leather suit, like armor—and you let it wear itself out like that, until the wildness goes away, and its will becomes instead your will.

  “It was a long time ago,” he said, “when I was raising all those young hawks and falcons—but I was good at it.” Dudley laughed. “They’d be all over the house—each on a different perch, and out in the garage. They stole the baby’s toys”—he glanced out at Mel, in the audience, almost as if not realizing she had been that baby—“and Madelyn, my wife, was always afraid they’d snatch the baby up—that they’d mistake her for prey while she was crawling around beneath them.” He studied Mel now as if for signs of scars from almost forty years ago. “They never did though,” he said. “I told her they wouldn’t, and they didn’t. There were some places where they wouldn’t hunt, simply because I didn’t want them to. Their will was my will,” he said again.

  He was shouting now, like a preacher. “I made those birds. God made them and then I took them from God and turned them around in the other direction and made them into something else.

  “There is this lightness the bird gets when it is on your arm, and when it is finally exhausted—when it finally gives up,” Old Dudley sang. “When it gets to that point—when you have won—you can actually feel something leaving the bird, and can feel it getting lighter as a result, until it is almost weightless. God, it’s sweet when that happens,” he said. “Usually sometime around the fourth or fifth day. You’d think they’d fight longer. Considering I own them forever, once this happens.”

  Colter’s face had grown more serious throughout the recitation, so that now it was in sharp contrast to all the other faces around him, who were enjoying the entertainment. Colter leaned across the table to speak to Wallis, though Mel and the others at the table could hear him too.

  “I don’t like him,” he said, and then sat back in his chair, brooding.

  Old Dudley raved on. He was shouting now about the best bird he’d ever had—the giant Asian eagle, the berkutsk. Dudley said that the Arabian princes who gave him the bird told him it had killed giant cranes, and even leopards and tigers; that it had killed a hundred wolves in Russia, each time by diving and batting its great wings about the wolf, blinding it, and then driving its talons through the wolf’s head. He said they told him it had even killed men before, always unpredictably—killing its own masters, sometimes, out of boredom—falling upon them from out of the sky—and that you could even still see the stains of that human blood on its feathered shanks; that the stain of it would not wash out. Dudley was talking about how he’d always had to keep the bird out of direct sunlight, which had been a problem in West Texas—how their blood ran hot, usually around 111 degrees Fahrenheit, so that sometimes before hunting he’d had to trickle cold water over the eagle’s head and wings, because the bird’s heart would get to pumping so hard that he’d heat up just thinking about the hunt.

  “It was in the days before air conditioners,” Dudley said. “Driving out into the desert with him, at dusk, with him in the truck on the seat next to me, was like having this magma or something in there with me. God, what a beast,” Dudley said. “His fucking legs were six inches around. In the winter, when a cold front would blow through, I’d take him outside on my arm, and the steam would just roll off of him, when he ruffled his feathers: him so hot, and the sky so cold. God,” he said, “I remember everything about those days.”

  “I was a big bad motherfucker,” Dudley went on—the chemical release of the bonds in his brain perhaps finally beginning to occur, yielding to the alcohol’s inevitable will. “I was as big as him,” he said, gesturing to Matthew, who was coming back with two bottles of wine. “Carrying that big fucker around on one arm—it was like holding a whole set of encyclopedias out on your arm—and you owned the fucker, owned him in every way . . .”

  Snow continued to blow in through the open door. Dudley shivered, got up, and walked along the counter like a circus high-wire performer—at least one of his steps had a looseness, or a trace of drunkenness to it, but only barely—and he hopped down and shut the door, then climbed back up on the counter to finish his story.

  Mel interrupted him.

  “Oh, what a catastrophe for man,” she called out, quoting D. H. Lawrence, “when he cut himself off from the rhythm of the year, from his unison with the sun and the earth. Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and setting of the sun, and cut off from the magical connection of the solstice and equinox. This is what is wrong with us. We are bleeding at the roots—”

  “Hey,” Old Dudley said, “cut that shit out. Stop it,” he said. Mel smiled. Dudley rang the bell, rummaged in his pockets for more money.

  Dudley picked up his megaphone again. “There are two theories why the falcon returns to the falconer,” he bellowed, as if preparing his listeners for an exam to be given later. “One is that the falcon is conditioned to its hunger pains: that it has learned to associate its master with food. But the other theory is that the falcon truly loves the falconer, and returns solely out of love.”

  “Which do you think it is?” Mel asked.

  Matthew was listening intently.

  “Both,” said Old Dudley. “I think we manipulate them coming and going. I think the poo
r creatures are born with exquisitely pure souls which only through superior association with beings such as myself are able to be bent and retrained. I think we teach them to confuse hunger with love, and love with hunger. I think we mix it all together, and that only when they’re way the fuck up there, half a mile above, can they draw things back out pure and separate once more: a distillation of how it was when they came into the world, and how they are really supposed to be.

  “But it’s too late. They are owned by another. They have lost their ancient selves. They are but feathered ghosts.

  “Shit,” he said, “it’s a miracle they can still hunt, when we get through with them.”

  He climbed down from the counter, flush-faced—looking like an old man, and a little rusty, but still vigorous, and in some way that Wallis could not pinpoint, dangerous: as if some wild, unpredictable animal—a wolverine, perhaps—were in the bar among them. Not currently threatening them, but imminently capable of doing so. Dudley’s tong marks were pulsing violent red, throbbing, as if he had just been pulled up from the sea.

  The day had slid completely away from them, passing from afternoon to dusk so quickly and unremittingly that it seemed there had been some mistake: that two or three hours were missing. Wallis was matching Amy beer for beer, and Mel leaned across and whispered in his ear, “You have no restraint. You are like him.” Wallis—a little drunk now—lurched back in alarm, believing her to have said something cutting, but she was only cautioning him, and was joking.

  Other men joined Dudley at their table. Matthew, who had been sitting up front during Dudley’s storytelling—sitting beneath the counter looking up at him like a child in story hour—also pulled up a chair and sat with them. More beer. Mel drank water, as did Danny. Helen sipped bourbon and stared fondly at Matthew. She could count on two hands the number of days she got to see him in the valley each year. The years hurtling by as if they had no end.

  Mel coiled her hair as if it were a rope, lifted the ends of it to her face to take its scent—to ascertain the amount of cigarette smoke it had absorbed. She thought of the wolves, and of how sometimes they would backtrack her as she was backtracking them. “I’m going outside for a minute,” she said, touching Matthew’s arm. She lingered for a moment, as if believing or imagining that he might go with her—but Matthew and Dudley were explaining to Danny about how developing an oil field in the valley would not harm anything, and how it could even be of benefit to wildlife.

  Wallis rose and went out the door with Mel. They brushed away the snow that had blown in on one of the benches and sat down and watched the snow slanting past, and felt the cold’s embrace. Wallis could not remember the heat of the sun, and, surprisingly, did not care to. The snow that had been melting and dripping from the roof where the door had been open earlier in the day had already frozen into long shining teeth that hung down like glassine bars.

  “I don’t remember him being like this in Houston,” Wallis said. “Maybe I was a little blind to it, because I had the maps to work on, but I don’t think so. He was eccentric and opinionated, but not like this,” Wallis said. “Not out of control. Not crashing.”

  “He’s not crashing,” Mel said. “He’s riding hard. He’s riding you and Matthew. Those kinds of performances cost him nothing. That’s not out of control. You don’t know out of control.” She reached up and broke off one of the icicles. “I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s like he’s got you and Matthew down in the mud and is standing with one foot on each of you. Like he’s blossoming out of you.” She sucked on a tip of the icicle. “He’s worse around the solstices, it’s true.” She shook her head. “God knows what’s in his blood.”

  They were quiet for a while, letting the snow and wind carry away the words that had passed between them. Mel splayed her fingers through her hair, helping the wind and the cold to scrub the scent from her. Where did odors go when they disappeared? Where did words go, once spoken? She tugged at a tangle of hairs, and a couple pulled free; she tossed them into the wind for the wrens to find and build nests with in the spring, or for mice to line their beds with.

  “Why don’t you leave him?” Wallis asked.

  “It’s not that easy,” she said. She held out her arm as if to offer one for the donating of blood. “Besides,” she said, “I have to be better than him. When he’s bad, I have to be good. It’s not any conscious decision on my part. I can just feel the balance of things that way—like when you’re on a seesaw. And also,” she said, “he and Matthew are inseparable. They’re becoming one. They’ve already become one.”

  “Why don’t you drop Matthew, too?” Wallis asked.

  Mel was silent for a long time, and Wallis did not know how much he had offended her.

  “It’s like he’s becoming my brother, more than my lover,” Mel said finally. “It’s very sad.”

  Matthew came out onto the porch, having torn himself away from Dudley long enough to look for them. Helen followed him, and they sat on a bench next to Mel.

  To the three younger people, the cold was invigorating, but to Helen it was brutal. Still she could not break loose from the sight of her son. She knew from many years of experience that when he and Old Dudley decided to leave, they did so quickly, like the flash of a fish turning broadside in the current: silver for a moment, then gone.

  It was snowing so hard that they could not see her store across the street. Helen leaned in against Matthew for warmth, as did Mel, and Wallis had the thought, You two are leaning against a rotting building. He felt a strange strength and calm in his isolation.

  “They say everything happens twice,” Helen said, staring out at the snow, and none of them had any idea what she was talking about. Mel thought she might be thinking of some long-past companion, or even a lover. Matthew wondered if she meant some weather pattern. Wallis, who had been thinking about Dudley’s puzzling exhibitions, wondered if she meant another Dudley might be coming, or created. That Matthew might be the one.

  “At least twice,” Helen said. “If you live long enough, you see everything happen once, and then you start to see it happen a second time.”

  Helen was shivering. “Let’s go back inside,” Mel said—wanting to sit and stare at the beauty of the storm, mesmerized, but taking pity on her—and they went in to the noise and heat of the bar. Charlie was arm-wrestling all comers two at a time. Old Dudley was deep in conversation with Colter. Amy had gotten up and left the table.

  Dudley carried with him sample vials of oil he’d found—carried the tiny glass bottles like talismans clinking in his pockets—and he opened one now to show Colter what it was like when it came straight out of the ground, unrefined. “Hidalgo County, 1937,” Dudley said, and Wallis laughed at the expression on Colter’s face: at the way he clearly thought that was ancient.

  The oil had been discovered and brought to earth’s surface sixty years ago. But it had been in the world, resting below, fully formed and waiting, for four hundred million.

  Did some of the power lying in the gap between that disparity go to the man who discovered it? Even if there were but a tiny transference of that enormous distance, Wallis figured, the accrual would be immense.

  When a trapper trapped and took the life of a wild and free creature—say, a marten or a wolverine—did a transference of force—even a tiny one—also occur there? The sum of all of the days of the wolverine’s passage over mountains and through valleys, in all manners of seasons, ending up with the snap of the trap, or the crack of a rifle: and did the taker assume then even an echo of all that which had previously been possessed by the other?

  Dudley was unscrewing the lid to one of the vials and inviting Colter to take a sniff of it, to dip his finger in it. The oil glistened in the dim light, reflected lanterns and light bulbs—darker than blood, black as licorice, shiny as obsidian, it seemed not to be anything as potent as the raw fuel of man’s commerce as something simpler and more elemental: like a stone, an antler, or a piece of wood—its properties and cha
racteristics not yet manipulated in one direction or the other.

  “Go ahead,” Dudley urged Colter. “Dip your little finger in it. Feel how slick it is.” Colter did so, tentatively; sniffed it. It had a sweet odor, not quite like anything he had smelled in this world. Old Dudley winked at him. “It’s especially fine for applying to your bony member,” he said, “when you’re trying to fit it into crevices and orifices which will not normally accommodate your bulk—”

  “Pop!” Mel said, and Old Dudley jumped, not having noticed their return. Colter wiped his finger off on a napkin hurriedly as Amy came back from the restroom. Old Dudley stared at her for long moments with depthless, predatory eyes—becalmed, it seemed, finally, just to be considering her.

  “There is no man who is not born into a trap, and yet all labor to climb out,” he said, and at first they thought he was reciting poetry. “But what man has the courage to embrace his trap, and not fight against it, but dwell wholly within it?”

  He leaned forward to take the scent from behind Amy’s ear—to inhale deeply, and imagine himself already within her—but pitched forward, finally drunk, and passed out on the floor.

  “He is excited from his travels,” Matthew said. “He hardly ever passes out. He is excited to see you,” he told Mel.

  “Bullshit,” Mel said. “He’s old and drunk.”

  They sat him up in his chair—his head lolled like a pumpkin—and wrapped him in a blanket. Colter went across the road and rummaged in one of Helen’s ancient outbuildings for a sled. He came back carrying the sled and a bleached buffalo skull. “What’s this?” he asked Helen.

  “Just an old thing I got somewhere—someone left it at the store a long time ago. Do you want it?”

  “Hell yes,” Colter said. Amy was aghast. “I mean, heck yes. Yes ma’am,” he said.

  They loaded Dudley onto the sled, folded him into it like a child going for a ride. His arms hung over the sides and his head was tipped back, his face upturned, his open mouth gathering snow. His legs were splayed out in front of him, so that they had to lash them to the side of the sled. Everyone gathered out on the porch to see them off.