Where the Sea Used to Be

by Rick Bass

  They sat and watched the light fade from the valley. When blue dusk had slid down off the hills and covered the valley below with cool shadow, they rose and folded their hides into the pack and buckled on their snowshoes and started back down the mountain in the dimming light. The first stars were out by the time they reached the cabin.

  There was no turkey, but Mel went down to the smokehouse and selected the five largest spruce grouse. She sprinkled salt, pepper, and thyme on them, draped bacon over their breasts, and placed them in the wood stove over a pan of water. The cabin had gotten cold while they had been gone. Old Dudley poured Helen a glass of brandy, and she smiled and thanked him. Wallis and Matthew went down to the creek to begin hauling more water for baths.

  The creek gurgled into the metal buckets as they lowered them into the cold dark waters. The sudden, frightening suck and surge of the buckets as they quickly filled was a feeling like falling through the bottom of something: ice, perhaps.

  A star melted from the sky—sparkled as it fell.

  The cabin warmed slowly; the rafters and beams groaned, accepting the heat. Matthew and Wallis stripped to their long underwear shirts and jeans. Old Dudley and Helen sat by the fire, wearing their coats. The first round of water was heated enough for a bath, so Helen went first. She had begun to shiver and cough, even sitting next to the fire, and Matthew had gone and poured the water into the tub for her. Steam billowed out of the bathroom and down the cold hallway as he poured it; Mel gave Helen an elk hide to use for a robe. Dudley filled her brandy glass again and told her to sit in the tub and sip that and she’d never cough again. It was the longest she had been without a cigarette since she was a girl.

  Matthew went into the kitchen to be with Mel as she cooked and Wallis found himself alone with Old Dudley, with Dudley’s strange gaze fixed upon him.

  And as if Old Dudley could see Wallis’s thoughts right then, as the deer is said to see the puffs of vapor coming from the cougar’s nostrils as the cougar hides in ambush, Old Dudley began to speak to Wallis as if taunting him: speaking about eyes, and about the different ways of seeing. He was talking about his falconry days again—a sure sign, Mel had said, that he was relaxed.

  “Curious bastards,” he said. “They were always fucking with the neighborhood cats and dogs,” he said. “Mel’s mother and Mel and I were living out in Odessa—dust bowl country. I was running jug lines for Texaco, for five bucks an hour. Every day when I left for work, this old redtail I had—” Dudley faltered for half a second, started to give them the bird’s name, then smiled at the momentary impulse toward sentimentality—“would be sitting on the sidewalk in front of one of the neighbors’ houses, on top of some dead heap of fur. Cats, usually, but sometimes small dogs. It would be tearing at the fur and tufts of it would be blowing straight away in that horizontal Odessa wind that was always blowing, morning, noon, and night. I remember that it would put me in a certain frame of mind,” he said, “driving to work each day, driving to the field, after having seen such a thing.”

  Mel and Matthew had finished in the kitchen. The food was ready and kept warm on the stove; they were waiting only for Helen, but would not rush her—soon enough, her bath water would grow chilly, and she’d come out—and Mel broke into Old Dudley’s story.

  “Yeah, and I was the one who had to clean up those damn cats and dogs before the neighbors found them,” Mel said. “And sometimes they found out anyway, and would shriek at me. I was the one always taking your heat.”

  “There were rumors, weren’t there?” Dudley murmured, half to himself—rubbing his temple with one hand.

  Mel scowled, knowing she was being baited.

  “They said we ate them,” she told us.

  “We were poor, I have to say that,” Dudley agreed. “I can see how they might surmise . . .”

  “I was not a class favorite,” Mel said. “We kept having to move farther and farther out of town to distance ourselves from our neighbors and their supply of cats and dogs. Finally it was just us and the hawks and rabbits living out in the desert—big manic jackrabbits. And dust, and wind.”

  “Curious bastards,” Old Dudley said again. “They’ve got those huge eyes, set in their tiny heads,” he said. “Now you can’t quote me on this, but I’ve always had the notion that they’ve really got nothing in their brains—and that all their impulses are wired straight from their eyes to their body.”

  Dudley was leaning forward, setting the bottle of brandy aside and pouring a glass of rum. The years were fading from him; he seemed not a day over fifty, there in the shadows of the fire.

  “This I do know for a fact,” he said. “What I do know for a fact,” he explained, “is that they’ve got these two kinds of eyes, each one of them.” He set his drink down, rolled up his sleeves. He pointed to one of his eyes and then the other.

  “I don’t remember if it’s the left eye for one and the right eye for another—I don’t remember how it goes,” he said. “But one eye they use strictly for hunting—for searching—looking for shit. That eye is totally in command of searching for game. And then the other eye is wired only for the kill. They fly around all their lives like this—two sets of live hot wires leading into their body. They look at everything through those two eyes. And when those two wires cross—when they get you in their sights, so that you’re suddenly in the focus—then pow!”—Dudley smacked his fist in his palm—“it doesn’t matter who or what you are, they’ve got your ass, and you won’t be able to get away.”

  He sat back, pleased with himself, and he allowed himself a tiny sip of rum, as if afraid that too much of it too soon after his story would chase away the warmth that he was feeling.

  “Why did you stop?” Wallis asked.

  He cocked his head sideways. “Because they couldn’t bring me enough,” he said. “They’d get tired of killing after only a few flights each day.”

  Mel rose to begin putting food on the table. “Oh, bullshit, Pop,” she said. “He got rich. He stopped walking in the fields after work each evening with his hawks and instead stayed home, and up late at night, mapping his own prospects. Saved his pennies to buy the leases, then went out and sold deals while he was still working for Texaco, quit his job the day they spudded his well, and the rest, as they say, is history. He got enough, all right.”

  “Did you creep then?” Wallis asked, and perhaps it was some shift of firelight—coals from a log crackled, and a piece of wood fell like a burning bridge—because Dudley looked older again. He looked down at his drink and smiled a bit, as if amused that he was telling the truth. He said, “No, I ran then—like a hound,” and finished his drink.

  “How many birds did you lose?” Wallis asked.

  He grimaced. “Ahh,” he said, rubbing his temples and looking around for the bottle, “a shitload. The new ones were always flying away. Sometimes I’d only have one for a few days. They were always leaving,” he said. “I couldn’t hold on to one for shit. And worst was when I had a good one. I had one, an old bullet-headed goshawk, that I’d had for over a year. I took eight rabbits in an afternoon with that hawk. He was insatiable. But then he left. They all leave,” Dudley said, with some surprise, as if he had only now realized it; as if all this time he had been thinking of each leave-taking as coincidental, not connected to any pattern or law or certainty.

  He cleared his reverie then—shook his head as a bull might after having been foiled by some false pass at a red flag, and now he was his age once more; and where he had come from, and all that past, was far below once more—so far as to seem to have no bearing on the here and now, on this cold night-after-Christmas. “That’s all over now, anyway,” he said, and rose, looking for a new bottle.

  “Supper,” Mel said. She was smiling, and Wallis suspected that with the exception of a very few, perhaps, it was possible she had everyone she cared about corralled into her cabin that night, with the great shell of winter acting as a barrier for her—almost as if she’d herded or trapped them.
/>   “The water’s got to be getting cold by now,” Matthew said. “Maybe you should go check on Helen?”

  “I hate to rush her,” Mel said. “We’ll wait just a minute more.”

  They sat in silence and listened for the slightest noise that might give them a clue she was finishing. The swollen moon out the window looked injured—flattened by some distortion of the cold night air. It rose through the tops of the fir trees on the south ridge—chasing the winter-short sun—and they watched it for a while, smelled the food, listened to their stomachs grumble, waited on Helen, and anticipated the meal.

  In the new, crooked light of the moon, they saw the large dark shape of an animal moving around in the yard.

  They rose and went to the window. It was a moose drifting slowly by—not feeding, only passing through, just beyond where the weak yellow window light fell on the snow.

  Something sparkled in the moonlight—something in the moose’s ribs moved up and down with the moose’s movements. It was long and metallic. As his eyes adjusted to the night, Wallis thought it looked like a knitting needle, but then understood that it was an aluminum arrow.

  “That’s an old one,” Mel said. “See how there’s no blood on its side, and no steam coming from the wound? I’ve been seeing her for four years now. The arrow must have hit a rib and gotten bent in there sideways, maybe just inches from her heart. And now all this scar tissue’s built up around it and holds the arrow into place. She’s as good as new. The scar tissue’s probably stronger than the muscle it cut. I see her every year,” she said. “I’m glad she’s still okay.”

  The moose walked off into the trees—disappeared into the branchy whispers of fir, pine, and spruce, fitting back into the woods like an arrow passing between two ribs. A mist of snow trickled from one of the branches where the moose had gone—it caught the moonlight and glittered as it fell—and then there was no sign. The woods sealed back in around her.

  “Helen must be asleep,” Mel said. “I’ll fix her some coffee. Then we’ll eat.”

  Mel put the food back on the stove to heat again. The grouse sweated beads of fat-juice. Wallis was so hungry that if no one else had been in the room, he would have started gnawing on the bird.

  Mel took a cup of coffee in to Helen.

  They heard Mel knock on the door; heard her open it and ease inside. There was a long silence, and then they heard Helen hack and cough, a sound like a generator being started up—and then there were the quiet, unintelligible murmurs of the two women—an exclamation of surprise and a thank you—more hacking, as Helen came slowly back into the world—and Wallis wondered then, and marveled at, the fine line between living and dying—and at what point the process began.

  Mel went to the kitchen and got the food to put on the table, and the others followed her. Wallis was a little surprised by the pleasure she took in the ceremony and ritual of tradition. She lit more candles, arranged the plates, straightened a placemat. The bone-handled knives glinted in the candlelight.

  “She was sound asleep,” Mel said, in quiet wonder. “She was dozing with just her head above water, and there was a skim of ice, the littlest bit of it, forming around the edges of the tub.”

  “She must really have needed to sleep,” Matthew said.

  “Careful what you ask for,” Mel said.

  Helen came into the room, dressed and wrapped in the elk hide, her face the blue-white color of someone who’d drowned. She stood by the fire for only a few seconds before Mel shepherded her and the others to the table. They took their seats, and Wallis thought for a moment that Mel was going to say a prayer. She bowed her head but didn’t speak, and then Matthew reached across the table for a grouse.

  Crumbs from the fresh-baked rolls fell to the floor; knives and forks clashed like swords. They drank wine, finished bottle after bottle until it was gone, and then Old Dudley stood up and said that they had to leave.

  A look like anger crossed Mel’s face but she said nothing. Helen said, “Please, no,” but Dudley gave no sign of having heard her.

  They dressed warmly and Matthew hugged Helen good-bye. Helen was too tired and cold to follow them into town. She stayed in the cabin while the four of them skied off to find people to help them dig out the limousine.

  They gathered several recruits from the bar—Amy among them—and went knocking door to door as well, passing from cabin to cabin, reasoning that those who had not been in the bar drinking all day might be more stout of back. It was a little after ten o’clock when the procession, with lanterns and torches, arrived at the spot where the limousine had sunk through the snow. The moon seemed to be pouring down a coldness upon the land and the skin of the snow had stretched taut enough again so that it was possible, though not probable, that they might be able to drive out again. Their old tracks had already vanished. Wallis didn’t think they could do it.

  They’d brought shovels and saws and chains and horses and come-alongs, and they built fires to warm their hands. Matthew began digging at the snow; soon he carved out a tunnel that went beneath the car. He disappeared beneath the ice and others handed flat rocks down to him to place beneath the wheels, rocks gotten from the disassembling of his wall. Other workers were busy cutting poles and laying them beneath the wheels.

  Dudley stood wrapped in a fur robe, watching it all. They kept laying flat rocks, disassembling a section of Matthew’s wall, trying to build a small road up from out of the snow pit and back up onto the frozen ice. The light from the lanterns, and from the warming fires, cast a pulsing light on Dudley, so that he seemed to somehow be a part of the flames, as the light of those fires washed across him.

  Old Dudley noticed Amy on the other side of the road and crossed over to see her. She began moving away from him, and he followed. She began walking in large circles around the car, not wishing to talk to him, but still he followed, until soon she was trotting, and he was running after her. Colter had not come with her—he was back at their cabin, skinning the pelts of the martens he’d caught that day. After a while Amy slowed to a walk, tired from running, and Dudley slowed to a walk also, still following her around and around; but finally she stopped, and Dudley stopped next to her.

  Amy was breathing hard, like a deer chased by hounds. Bright silver plumes of crystalline breath rose from her nostrils. He said something to her that no one could hear and she turned from him and started walking away again, almost trotting once more; and once again, he followed.

  Matthew managed to get deeper beneath the car, and he finally got the jack from the car’s trunk beneath one of the wheels. He began winding it up, but the car wouldn’t rise high enough to crack out of its ice shell. Mel borrowed one of the chain saws and began cutting slabs of ice away from the sides. Sparks flew from the guide bar as the chain brushed metal from time to time, friction that flowered into orange light and scattered across the snow like stars spilled. The woods were dense with the smell of smoke from the chain saws, busy with the noise of the workers.

  Men began hitching their horses to the bumper as Mel cleared enough space in the snow for them to do so—in his eagerness, one man stepped in too close as Mel was turning away, so that the still-revving blade of her saw caught his pants leg up around the thigh and tore a quick rip in it, exposing bare skin—“Careful!” Mel cried—and the lookers-on standing by the fires passed around a bottle and offered advice to the diggers.

  The horses were hooked to their chains and ropes and turned to look back at the load they would be pulling. Only the roof of the limousine was visible. It seemed to Wallis that the horses were eyeing the burden with dispassionate confidence.

  Mel was on top of the entombed car, cutting the ice and snow cakes from it with her saw. Chips of ice sprayed her and the others in a firelit shower, caked against their faces and brows. From time to time Mel would straighten up to rest her back, with the saw still idling, and would brush her hair back from her face. When she bent back down to address the ice, the tip of the blade occasionally caught the su
bmerged roof of the car and threw brilliant glowing embers of burning metal into the sky.

  Matthew emerged from beneath the ground like a snow ghost and announced that he thought it was as ready as it would ever be. Old Dudley left Amy then—“Until the spring, adieu!” he cried—and came over and stood at the edge of the crevice and looked down upon the car. Backlit by the fire and shrouded in the heavy robe like a trench coat, he looked as if he were presiding over a burial, not a birth, and yet a burial for which there was good cheer.

  Old Dudley and Matthew shook hands with Wallis. “You should come with us,” Dudley said. “I’ve changed my mind about your staying.”

  Wallis studied him for a moment, then surprised himself by saying no—and Dudley, also surprised, squinted to look into Wallis’s eyes to read him—but in the dim light, he could not be sure what he saw. “You should come with us,” Dudley said again, but again Wallis said no, and Dudley smiled then and pretended that he wasn’t bothered by it. He reached out and shook Wallis’s hand again.

  Mel shut the chain saw off, and she set it down and hugged Matthew a long time, but did not kiss him good-bye—only leaned into him—and then she held Dudley for a moment as well, circled her arms around him as if trying to cast a child’s spell over him, some futile spell, to make him stop being the way he was.

  She turned to Matthew again, who was still shrouded in snow. She took her gloves off and with her thumbs wiped the crust away from his eyebrows, then his cheeks and mouth, as if sculpting him back into who he was, or had been. Now finally she kissed him, leaned forward and took his face in both hands and kissed him as if releasing him forever. Matthew glanced back at Wallis one more time, and then he and Old Dudley climbed down into the snow crevice and in through the open windows, rolled the windows up, and started the car.

  The limousine was still down in a hole, but the way out was now clear. Everyone gathered around and began to push, and Matthew, driving, revved the engine—the tires spun uselessly on their ice peels—but the horses, pulling from the other end, in combination with the shoves of the people, finally got the car moving. It groaned up from out of the pit and cracked free of its ice grip with a sound like a plate of glass breaking. The horses dragged it, skidding and bumping, sliding sideways, up onto the makeshift rock road that had been built, where the wheels found purchase; but still the horses kept pulling, breaking into a gallop now, in the spirit of the challenge, and the people kept pushing too, running down the road as if hurling the car from them.