Where the Sea Used to Be

by Rick Bass

  Meantime other individuals were planted by this, or near this, and by and by, they were so enlarged that they grew together, and grew as one animal. So hundreds and thousands of animals grew together and continued to grow and enlarge the structure during probably a thousand years.

  As time passed, this organism grew old and effete. The life-time of its species was drawing to a close. It was destined to be replaced by something better suited to the improved circumstances of the world.

  All the time, however, the sediments had been gathering about the bases of the rising reef mass—as the dust of time accumulates about the temples of the ancient cities. As they become buried and forgotten—buried thousands of feet deep—buried in sea sediments which became stone. Then the aeons of the world continued to roll by. Oh, what a varied history was enacted while the tombs of Eozoo remained silent and undiscovered!

  In the Age of Mind, a marble edifice was demanded to meet some want of civilization. The primeval tomb was opened by the quarryman, and there rested the relics of the first inhabitant of our globe. It is that of which we have been speaking. We are the quarrymen.

  OLD DUDLEY ARRIVED LATE ONE AFTERNOON, WALKING UP the trail on flapping ancient beechwood snowshoes and wearing a parka lined with wolf fur. He was walking with a deer-antler walking stick and singing “The Eyes of Texas” at the top of his lungs. Mel ran down the trail to greet him and to quiet him, so that Matthew could still sleep.

  “It’s been too long,” he said. “Has accident befallen my young man?” He patted Mel’s flat belly. “Still unimpregnated, I see,” and Wallis, who had gone down the trail also to meet him, marveled at how quickly the old man could take the wind out of any joy or peace: how he appropriated it, soiled it for the beholder, and in so doing made it perversely his own.

  “Little namby-pamby crybaby was a bit woozy when he left,” Dudley said. “He’s not still sleeping, is he?” Mel nodded. “Sissy,” he hissed, and started to further enumerate Matthew’s failings, but then noticed the bond between Mel and Wallis—a looseness of shoulder, a half-step closer to him on her part—a trace of odor, of comfort together—and he arched his eyebrows, was startled for a moment, but then said to Wallis, “Well, you must really be putting the wood to her. How many times a day, how many times a night, in love’s first flush? Ah, but no matter, it will fade. Some day she will spurn you, twenty years hence, as she seems to have spurned my little man.” He shook his head sadly, and for a brief moment his ice-blue eyes locked with the eyes of Mel’s green fire, and Wallis could almost hear Dudley’s brain gears spinning as he recalculated the lay of the land.

  “Pop,” Mel said, “you’re the only other blood I’ve got left in the world, and it’s good, as always, to see you, but you’re going to have to cut the shit or leave. I don’t have the time for it I used to. I can’t shake it off like I used to. I used to be able to ignore it. But it bothers me now.”

  A sharpening of interest in Dudley’s eyes—a glinting of pleasure. “You’re getting older,” he said.

  “I’ve got a job,” Mel said.

  “Good God, girl,” Dudley cried, “your first one! Congratulations!” He turned to evaluate Wallis anew.

  Wallis took note of the old man’s humped, still muscular shoulders—as if there were a young man beneath the parka, and wondered what it had been like for Dudley as a child—teased pitilessly about the tong marks, surely, and then to have to watch his father slaughter, for lack of a better word, a fellow countryman—as if he had been nothing more than meat—a hog or a cow waiting to be killed. As if in his old father’s chest had beat some throwback heart, something not suitable to this civilized era but belonging more to the behavior of men from other, more savage times and places.

  Wallis didn’t care about any of that. It was interesting, but it was water under the bridge. He didn’t care if Dudley had horns sprouting out of his head; he could find oil, and when he showed them how to draw the maps, and showed them things about the workings of the old earth below, there was such a muscular purity, a precision, to his teachings, that Wallis didn’t care if it had been Dudley himself who had done the stabbing, burying, and burning: he would have listened anyway. He would have been unable to turn away. He wanted to know what lay below.

  They walked up the path to the cabin. Now there were tiny patches of earth showing around the trunks of trees, and Mel and Wallis stopped at one of the larger patches to simply stare with awe at the beauty of the black dirt, and at a few sprigs of juniper and kinnikinnick. Old Dudley watched them with fascination. “Why, y’all are cripples, is what you are,” he said. “Your lives aren’t worth a damn. You’ve got to add up both of y’all to even make a fraction of a normal, healthy, human being. Look at you poor fuckers, staring at dirt! You should both come back to Houston, where you can see all the dirt and grass you want. My Lord, children,” he said, as Mel and Wallis stood there and admired the patch of bare ground, “what is wrong with you?”

  They ignored him; they stood transfixed, unblinking, feeling a strength entering them, filling the fiber of their muscles with a power as had the sunlight and sound of flowing water stirred their blood earlier.

  Old Dudley sensed it, and could sense also that it was not happening to him—a gulf, an absence—and he was jealous. “Hey,” he said to Mel, tapping her on the shoulder with the back of his hand, “stop that.”

  Finally she looked up at him, her hypnosis broken, but her eyes seemed cloudy and distant, like those of a dreamer, or an old person, or one in love. Dudley waved his hand in front of her and said again, “Hey—stop that.”

  Dudley went straight to where Matthew was sleeping: gazed at him for a long while. Mel had been shaving him so that he did not grow a beard in his sleep, and Dudley commented, with some attempt at concern, on Matthew’s jaundiced condition. “What I want to know is,” he said, “how does he piss?”

  “He doesn’t,” Mel said.

  Dudley glanced at Wallis. “Does he still get boners?”

  Mel went into the kitchen to begin supper.

  Wallis watched as Old Dudley peered around the door to be sure she was gone, then gave Matthew a thumping kick to the ribs—not full force, but not a love tap, either. “Hey boy,” Dudley whispered, “wake up. You’re losing it. You’re losing everything.”

  Matthew’s mouth sagged open in unconscious protest, but then closed slowly—a movement that was strangely reptilian—and Dudley did not try to stir him again. Dudley frowned, then turned his attention to Wallis.

  “You should come home,” he said, and Wallis knew he meant immediately, rather than after the well was drilled.

  “I finished the map,” Wallis said.

  Dudley stared at him, not knowing what he meant at first—thinking he was speaking of one of Mel’s maps of wolf movements.

  “How?” Dudley asked, incredulous. He gestured outside. “You couldn’t have seen a fucking thing. It’s all covered with snow.”

  For the first time, Wallis felt a twinge of doubt, but pushed it back. The accumulation of all the days of confidence held like a sea wall against ocean’s breach. “I mapped the rivers,” Wallis said. “And the slopes. And old samples. And some of Matthew’s old maps . . .”

  “The incorrect ones,” Dudley said. “The ones down in the basement.” He glanced at the cellar door, then back at Wallis, and saw that he knew.

  “Yes,” said Wallis.

  “We’ll look at it after supper,” Dudley said. One more study of Wallis, to be sure that Wallis still belonged to him. “My old man was a corker, wasn’t he?” he said.

  “Yes,” said Wallis, “he certainly was.”

  They went into the kitchen, where Mel was cooking venison backstrap in an iron skillet. She finished searing it, added salt and pepper, and put the meat on three plates. She added a little water and flour to the skillet to make a thin gravy, but that was it, for supper—the venison, and red wine.

  Wallis tried to focus solely on the moment, and to enjoy the meal—no fut
ure, no past—and he glanced over at Mel by candlelight and smiled; tried to daydream for a moment, imagined loving her in the spring, and summer, and fall, if the well lasted that long, but then realized he was drifting again. He tried to plant his feet firmly in the moment: as if there might never be anything more than this evening—as if this could be the last of everything.

  He had one more bite of venison. Old Dudley had finished his and was looking hungrily at Wallis’s plate, but Wallis ate it quickly, before Dudley could steal it.

  “How’d you get here?” Mel asked. “You’re in pretty good shape, but you sure as hell didn’t walk all the way.”

  “Dog sled,” he said, proudly. “Dog fucking sled.” He raised his sleeve to his nose to smell it. “They stopped and shat every quarter mile of the way,” he said. “A green vitreous shit. Toxic. I couldn’t hire a fucking snowplow—no one would take me. You live in a wicked place,” he told Mel. “I tried to get here sooner. To wake Matthew and bring him back home before he enters fucking hibernation. But the young dogsled lady I contracted with—the lass—said her dogs were sick, and she had to rest them. Said she wouldn’t run them any farther. We had to stop for the night.” Dudley sniffed his sleeves. “The echoes of their putrescence bubblings rang all night. And the young lady would have nothing to do with me—spurned all of my advances, even those consisting of financial reimbursement. The stakes went quite high,” he said, shaking his head. “She finally left the tent and slept out with the shitting dogs. But here I am.”

  “Oh, God,” Mel said. “Where was she from—where did you hire her?” she asked, trying to think whether she knew anyone with a dog team.

  “That little shitcan outpost,” Dudley said. “The last place you come to. The other Swan. Anyway,” he said, shrugging, “I got here.”

  There was a bumping sound from the bedroom—a weak coughing—and Dudley leapt from the table and ran to check on Matthew, and the others followed—but he had only been stirring, and now lay on his side, still sleeping.

  They went back to the table. Wallis was eager to spread his map out and show it to Old Dudley, but Mel wanted to have a campfire.

  “It’s still winter!” Dudley cried, but Mel said, “No it’s not, it’s spring!” And they went out into the back yard, punching through the weakening snow in places and sinking to their waists. There were caverns of air beneath the snow all around them, but finally, by floundering like deer, they got out to the campfire ring, and with a shovel Mel excavated enough snow to reveal the stone wall of the fire ring and the benches.

  They went into the woods and began gathering fuel, snapping limbs and branches from the winter-tossed trees and carrying them back in armloads. They got the fire lit, then settled into the ice bowl Mel had carved out, as if into an amphitheater, and warmed themselves. Around them the snow and ice glazed, and they passed a bottle of wine back and forth; and to Wallis, in those moments, it was almost possible to believe that Old Dudley was normal, or at worst eccentric. Wallis was able to hold this illusion for about five minutes—until Mel got up and went off beyond the firelight to pee and Old Dudley leaned in and whispered, “She’s playing you like a fish! She’s committing a foul—robbing you from me, and from your work. She’s doing to you what the land does—she’s bending you, shaping you! Don’t relent! Drill through her! Take the pussy and run! Don’t let her trap you. You should maybe come back to Texas now.” He placed a veined old hand on Wallis’s thigh and gripped it hard: the tong marks at his temple pulsing like the summertime tympanum of a bullfrog.

  Mel returned and settled back into the ice cave. The light on their faces was orange, and at times the heat was intense, as if they were being roasted alive. “I see he’s trying to trade Matthew in for a newer model,” she said to Wallis, and Old Dudley grunted and said, “Same as you are, honey.”

  “Tell me about what it was like when you got out,” Wallis said.

  “You mean out of East Texas, or out of the Home?” Dudley asked. “The Home was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

  “The Home,” Wallis said.

  Dudley finished the last of the wine, tossed the bottle into the fire, and pulled another from beneath his coat. They began drinking anew.

  “I escaped a few times,” Dudley said.

  “Where’d you go?” Wallis asked.

  “The first time, I went all the way home,” Dudley said. “Ma wasn’t long for the world and Pap was looking pretty rough himself. Pap said I had a debt to society and had to finish paying it. He put me in his old shitcan truck and drove me straight back to the Home. Ma wanted to at least fix me dinner, and a pie to take with me, but Pap was going ape-shit. He’d gotten it into his loony old mind that I had gotten tired of taking the rap for him and that I’d come home to trade places with him. Shit,” Dudley said, “I’m probably lucky he didn’t kill me. He thought I was going to back out of my deal.” He laughed, shook his head. “He questioned my loyalty,” Dudley said. “Dumb fucker.”

  “Did he have any loyalty?”

  Dudley harumphed. “Obviously not.” He looked up at the stars. “All of my sterling characteristics, I received from my mother.”

  “Me too,” said Mel.

  “I took a boxcar out there,” Dudley said, “and got there damn quick—rode through the night and got there by daylight, just when the sun was coming up—but it took a lot longer, going back to the Home. I’ll bet I hadn’t been home thirty minutes before he was stuffing me in his old truck, taking me back.

  “The damn thing kept overheating. We’d have to sit and wait for it to stop hissing, then bail creek water into it to try and cool it down. And he couldn’t stand to just sit there and wait while it cooled—he had to keep moving forward, pushing forward, as if scared I would run away if we paused even long enough to sit beneath the shade of an oak tree. Instead, when the car was too hot to run, he’d push it by hand, with me at the steering wheel. Wiry little bastard would be huffing and puffing, sweating, about to pass out—we’d be rolling about one mile per hour, and even less than that, uphill—but he had to keep us moving. His soul was in torment,” Dudley said. “Rage equals the mass of a thing times its acceleration.

  “He’d huff and puff us up to the top of some little hill—I’d be worried that he would throw a clot, and I’d be stranded there—and finally we’d reach the crest, and he’d run around and get back in the truck, and we’d coast down the other side, wind rushing through the open windows, for a moment, until the hill bellied out and it was time to push again. I think that was when I first began to get the notion that he didn’t care for me: that there was something wrong with him.” Dudley touched one of his tong marks unconsciously. The fire had burned down to low coals and the three of them had edged in closer. “Oh, children,” Dudley murmured, “what thin edge separates the world from true madness? Is it a weak or rotting floor through which any generation can crash? Do we not yet have the grace of the buteos, the accipiters, and the eagles?” He stared at his bare hands, seeming ill at ease on what to do with them.

  “Later in the day, when it finally grew cooler, the shitcan started running again, and we drove on through the night. I was sleepy and lay down in the front seat. I watched the gas flares from the oil fields burning in the night—dozens, maybe hundreds of them, all around us. It was beautiful,” Dudley said. “I sure didn’t want to go back.

  “We got there at daylight. I lost the privilege of going outside for a solid fucking month. June. At night I’d see lightning bugs out my window. Oh, I cried some bitter tears,” he said.

  He opened a third bottle of wine, but didn’t pass this one around.

  “What about the other times?” Wallis asked.

  “I would only be gone for an hour or two,” Dudley said. “I would be out and back before they ever knew I was gone.”

  “You went over to the girls’ school,” Wallis guessed.

  “I would sit on their porch,” Dudley said. “I never really went inside. I could have. But it was eno
ugh to just sit there in the night breezes and feel them sleeping: and to walk around the perimeter of their dorms, and take in all the different scents.” Again, he touched his temples. “The calcium is slowly filling in my dents, over time. They’re not so bad, now. They were really bad then. I didn’t want to scare anyone.”

  “Is that where you met your wife?” Wallis asked.

  Dudley laughed, glanced at Mel. “Oh, no,” he said, “she was an angel. She had nothing to do with any of that. She was an angel,” Dudley said.

  “She was,” Mel added.

  “Then how—why—” Wallis began, and Dudley laughed, examined his big crooked hands again. They were the only thing about him that looked his age. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”

  They were silent for a while, after that. Later, Mel said, almost speaking to herself, “Sometimes I miss her so much that I still say her name out loud just to hear the sound of it.”

  The wind stirred the coals. Small flames leapt up and sucked at the cold air as if nursing. Dudley got up and put more wood on the fire. Pitched another empty wine bottle into the flames. The paper label on the bottle caught fire, so that it looked as if the bottle itself were burning. Old Dudley pointed to it and said to Wallis, “I suppose you want to know about epitheliality.” Mel snorted.

  She had heard Dudley lecture to, and capture, Matthew—had seen Dudley overtake and capture and absorb him like a glacier creeping down a hill that plucks a boulder from the hillside—but she didn’t think he’d be able to get Wallis. He seemed to lie at deeper depth—or to have the ability, when threatened by Old Dudley’s approach, to sink, like a fish that slowly lowers itself into deeper waters without seeming to move a fin—simply vanishing.