Where the Sea Used to Be

by Rick Bass

  The shorter the days became, the more beautiful they were. Some days the men stopped working late in the afternoon so that they could walk home in the long light—still pushing Old Dudley in the wheelbarrow—and to give Dudley a rest. Wallis didn’t see how the old man could keep going, but he knew that neither could Dudley turn away, and let Mel be even temporarily victorious.

  The light passed through the drought-thin leaves of the cottonwoods and aspens as if through yellow parchment, giving a glow of that same color to everything—yellow from the sun and the leaves, gold from the sepia of the smoke.

  Dudley’s blisters were suppurating from where he had walked and then crawled through the fire. He had new blisters, too, from where he’d been leaning on the brake. His back was hurting him, as were his old knees, but he was happy, as close to peace as he could get.

  They always crossed the river before dusk, in the laying-down slant of sunlight: back into the quiet village. A few students were hanging around the school picking apples. Every day, they could see the occasional gray threads of chimney smoke rising through the trees in the unburned, rotting sanctuary along the river, and could smell pies baking: apple and huckleberry. The muffled gurgle of a chain saw could be heard on one of the hills above town, and the ring of axes and mauls, a tiny wooden symphony conducted by the cooling nights. Old Dudley nodded off on the river crossing each day, falling asleep to the sound of river water trickling off the oars, but would awaken again upon reaching the near shore.

  Some evenings the three of them would go up the hill to the mercantile to eat supper together. One day a man had killed a doe with his bow and arrow—archery season was open, with rifle season not too distant—and he had her hanging from a tree by the neck and was skinning her. A raven had already found the man—or perhaps followed him in from the woods—and strutted boldly down the road toward him, like a sailor. The three men went over to examine the doe—a clean lung shot —and the man gave them one of the shoulders. He simply folded the shoulder back, made one curved knife stroke along the inside to separate the ligaments that held the shoulder in place, and it was theirs. They put salt, pepper, garlic on the roast and grilled it.

  The meal revived Dudley somewhat and he said that he was going to go see his daughter, his new daughter. Matthew said that he was going to bed. The bare shoulderbone gleamed a pearl color, resting on the grill by the side of the fire. Wallis was still strangely hungry: as if no amount of meat could fill him. He could feel not just the length of the nights increasing, but their weight. He could feel his old hunger returning.

  Matthew was quiet each day as he worked: as if the fires once within him were now only smoldering, slowly gutting him as they would hollow out an old tree. But even as his interior became more brittle, the labor was hardening and chiseling him again, melting his city life from him, so that it gave the illusion that what they were now seeing was his muscular core beneath; that there was no hollowing within.

  But Wallis could see it, and Old Dudley could see it. Mel had known it for a long time, but now Wallis was noticing it; and it was becoming, finally, self-evident to Matthew: that the shell of his muscles was returning, like rock armature, but that this time, his endurance and stamina were not. That finally there was nothing beneath the surface. Old Dudley had gotten it all.

  With his body chiseled back down to old iron, he grew colder more easily. Several times, late in the afternoons, he would have to take a break and go stand by the warmth of the motor to get himself back up to operating temperature. He would stand there shivering—anxious to get back into the hunt—but knowing that he had to pace himself, that he could not allow himself to get burned down before the oil was reached.

  Old Dudley watched him with a thing that was as close to sympathy as he was capable of feeling, and cursed yet again the rig workers who had fled, saying that he could train a gorilla to do what Matthew and Wallis were doing—that Matthew’s talents these days were in the office—and finally they had to quit even earlier and go home to warm up and dry out, though Wallis knew Dudley did it to rest the machine as much as Matthew. Some days it was so cold that they breathed clouds with each word.

  Dudley was ass-whipped: there was no other word for it. Still, he kept going. But now it was as if he were eating himself, not the world.

  The children wanted to visit the rig on a field trip, but Mel counseled against it, saying that the roar of the rig might damage their hearing, and the sight of it might damage their spirits. She said her father might say inappropriate things. But the students lobbied her hard, and in the end she saw that they were right—if nothing else, they needed to cross the river to go watch the drilling so that when they were older, they could help bear testimony to the before and after of a place—though Mel also understood as well as anyone that the before and after of things was always a moving target, slightly different with each day’s sunrise.

  They made a picnic of it. They crossed the river in canoes and life jackets. They ran eagerly up the road toward the sound of the rig. Wallis took them on a tour of the giant machinery, while Dudley and Matthew kept working. Old Dudley eyed the larger children as if evaluating them for labor.

  “How deep is it?” a boy wanted to know.

  “Eleven thousand feet,” Matthew said, glancing at the dial. “About two-thirds of the way there. But it gets hard, from here on. It gets real hard.”

  They could feel in their bones the caterwauling of the bit as it jumped up and down, torquing, trying to scratch its way through denser, older rock. What they were looking for, Wallis told them, was new rock beneath the old rock. They were looking for a place where the layers of earth had been swirled, bent, folded, and flexed back on themselves, so as to provide layers of repetition. The rig would in essence keep drilling through the same formations, again and again, but at greater depths each time, until finally, near the bottom, they would find younger rocks trapped far beneath the older rocks—as if youth were tucked below age, far beneath the curl of a towering wave.

  And the story of the drill bit already reflected that this was what they were finding. The drill would go fast for a while, as the bit ate its way down quickly through the younger, softer rock; then it would slow down almost to a halt as it encountered the older, more resistant formations.

  It was kicking Old Dudley’s ass. He would lean down on the drilling brakes, then let up, then lean down again, as if trying to tap or chisel at the formations using an eleven-thousand-foot awl. Every shudder and torque below passed up the drill string and into his old body like a conduit. His old eyes would drift crookedly, by day’s end. His teeth ached, as did his feet and shoulders from the constant vibrations.

  He felt trapped. He knew he should walk away from this one—abandon it, for the time being, to the coming winter, and let Mel have another year of peace. But he kept drilling, even as he felt his life, his reserves, draining from him: as he found himself doing the work he had always hired others to do for him.

  The students went back down to where Mel was waiting for them. They set out a picnic blanket in the drying yellow autumn grass and ate cold grouse and apples and watched the men up on the rig. The children seemed impervious to the noise, and after their meal, lulled by the mild sun, lay in the grass and napped.

  Wallis looked down at them from the rig floor: watched Mel’s hair, white and sunlit, almost incandescent, catching and absorbing, altering, the light. He wondered if the baby could feel the sunlight.

  THE FIRES NOW SEEMED NO MORE HARMLESS THAN ARTESIAN fountains—like water that burbled continuously from some cleft of a rock, growing neither larger nor shrinking, but always flickering. The villagers, spurred by autumn, resumed the cutting of firewood, even in the midst of the fires. They began clearing the road to the summit, cutting and sawing those fallen, charred logs into firewood. The chinking sound their axes made against the burned wood was different from the sound it usually made striking green or cured wood. It was more metallic, and the sound had less resonance, and
died away more quickly. It was like the sound of railroad workers driving iron spikes, or like the sound in the blacksmith’s shop during the shoeing of horses. It was as if the sound of iron were everywhere—as if the woods had been altered—and as if all softness had been lost to the valley for some indeterminate time.

  Sometimes from the rig floor, through a gap in the trees, Wallis could look out across the river and see the figures of the townspeople removing the logs. It was strange to see how quickly everyone adapted. It looked like some scene from hell, and yet the villagers were moving around as if already accepting the near-total transformation: flames licking all around them, ash covering everything like snow, and rocks and trees split open from the heat as if from bombs.

  They went about their work methodically, chopping and rolling the logs to one side, as if this were the same world they had been born into: or as if they could not see the difference.

  Each night Wallis bathed in the creek, then bathed again in the tub before coming to bed; and each night, Mel’s hands and arms accepted him, pulled him close to her. She sniffed his body for scent from the rig, but he made sure he had it cleansed from him, and she was satisfied.

  The garden was now a fallow frost-sheared rubble of dead brown leaves, though there were jars and cans of its residue, its bounty, stored in the basement.

  He felt her bare belly with his hands: traced the slope of it, as if trying to map any subtle changes. How strange again it was to know a thing was there without seeing any evidence of it.

  Matthew usually stayed up in the crow’s nest all day, dreamily swinging a new stand of pipe into position whenever it was required of him. Wallis and Old Dudley spent much of their time between pipe connections crouched at the mud pits, catching the recirculating drill cuttings with a strainer and examining those fragments, and plotting and replotting the drill rates. They were beginning to notice thinning layers of rock, as if the sheets of earth below had undergone vast stretchings and alterations, and daily they found themselves amending and revising Wallis’s map slightly, as their drilling revealed more tortuous swirlings than even what Wallis had predicted: the legacy of ancient, massive pressures applied from several directions, and forever unyielding, like giant hands squeezing wet clay, shaping and smearing it across a crooked landscape.

  Belle and Ann had left Mel in charge of class for a full day, had made the six-hour roundtrip run down into the other village of Swan—had cleared the rest of the way with a chain saw—and had come back with a truckload of pumpkins, which they stacked on the porch of the saloon for anyone who wanted them; and now at night there were pumpkins, carved and glowing, in the windows and on the front porches of all the cabins, as if mirroring the image of the burning woods just beyond.

  A school play; Romeo and Juliet. The villagers sat in the bar and watched it. Old Dudley sat in the front row with Amy and the baby. The play was eerie by lanternlight.

  The older students helped the younger ones recite their lines. The villagers clapped at the end of each act. Amy had made pumpkin pies and cider for refreshments. Dudley sat with a pie resting on each knee and a third in his hands, eating it as he would a giant sandwich. The ash from the fires was still falling like snow, and there was the heaviness, the compression, of that silence, like a blanket being laid over the world.

  It amazed Mel that the students were in class each day: amazed her that none of them skittered away. They showed up every day. They listened to what she had to say; they drank it in. After so many years of silence, it felt strange to be speaking, as the woods poured out of her.

  The children took what they needed, drinking it in like water, and let the rest go past. It was as if she were a river. They stood at the edges and watched, and listened. They took from her what they needed, and listened to her voice.

  The three men had dinner together at the mercantile again: twelve thousand feet. Dudley, looking emaciated, ate the last three cans of Spam with both hands and then opened a can of lemon pie filling and ate that with a spoon. As lean as he was, he looked like a young man by candlelight. The fires glimmered, up in the mountains. A bat flew in through Helen’s open window upstairs and flitted wildly around the candles, looking for moths. They kept eating, untroubled by the bat. Wallis felt another weakening within, like the falling-through of rotten planks below, as he realized that he wanted there to be oil or gas down below: a great sprawling reservoir of oil, black as night and flammable, sweet and clean. He wanted to pump it up, suck it up out of that old trapped ocean that lay beneath them.

  It would just be a little hole in the ground. It wouldn’t change things much.

  Dudley finished his meal and got up and opened the front door to let the bat out, and went out on the porch. “Gonna rain tonight,” he said. “I can feel it in my dick.”

  Wallis and Matthew didn’t believe him but they got up and went out on the porch anyway. He was right, though. Wallis remembered the feel of it. The wind was from the south and the rain was very near, though where it had come from they did not know—only that it was coming in from the south like an animal. There would be no wavering left or right; it had them in its sights, and already, the valley was taking the leading edge of it, the south wind entering and funneling into the canyon like a tongue, and there was no lightning, only damp wind. They sat out on the porch and rolled up their sleeves and waited to receive it. Dry leaves tumbled down the street in advance of it, leaves hopping and skipping.

  The rain came in a spray at first—as if the wind that drove the rain had outrun it and carried with it, at its front, only the lightest drops—but still these were appreciated, savored, and the speed of the spray stung their faces and arms, and even Matthew laughed. Old Dudley was wearing a straw hat and the wind blew it off his head and blew the mercantile door open, and the hat, with a funneling of leaves, blew into the mercantile—the hat leading the way like a magic trick—and the curtains inside swirled and flapped as if something wild had gotten inside. Jars were knocked from the shelves and broke when they fell, and the fires out in the mountains flared brightly, quickly, enriched by that first gust of air, but then they disappeared completely as the night-purple wall of rain passed over them. The heavy drops slammed into them now, rain lash coming like an attack.

  The scent of steam, of fire hiss and water-splashed coals and ashes, was everywhere, and with the torrent also came mud, floating ash mixing with the rain to streak and coat them, but it didn’t matter. The three men went out into the street, and people came from out of the bar, and stood in the ash rain as if having believed, for a little while, that it would never rain again; and after a short while Wallis hurried home, to share the excitement with Mel.

  In the morning, the mountains above them were white. There was over a foot of snow up in the high mountains and the sky was purple with more storm clouds, and the larch trees’ gold needles blew through the sky in currents, and though it was not raining at the moment, they could feel another wave of it coming: the specificity of the air’s moisture as heavy as a wet burlap bag with stones in it. Sunlight poured down through breaks and openings in the clouds, but more rain was coming, and behind it, in the coming days, snow.

  Matthew fell from the rig that afternoon, under that purple sky—flurries beginning to stir once more, laying down yet another coat of snow—and he bounced off of a support girder and then tumbled into the engineworks below. There were abandoned tools and tool boxes down there, steel clutter and ragged pieces of iron, and when he landed he was still for a long time. Dudley and Wallis hurried down to check on him—it seemed to have been an inexplicable fall; he had been working the chains, swinging the next stand of pipe into position, and had just taken one step too many—had walked right over the edge as if forgetting where he was—and when they got to him, they saw that all was not well. He was starting to sit up, but had landed on a greasy screwdriver with a blade a foot long, and the blade had passed just beneath his ribs. They could see the black oil on the end of the screwdriver, could see th
e beginnings of blood spreading around it. The blood had not yet gotten into the new snow; it was still gathering around Matthew’s stomach.

  He was groggy from the fall. There were a few scrapes on his head and face, from where he’d bounced around on the girder, but they were inconsequential. Wallis was strangely as aware of Old Dudley’s reaction—or nonreaction—as he was of his own concern.

  Old Dudley might have appeared to have been in shock as well, but Wallis knew better. Dudley just didn’t care. He stared blankly at the scene—the red soaking wider around Matthew’s ribs, now—and if he looked faintly troubled, it seemed to be more because he realized he was being called upon to respond with an emotion that he just didn’t have.

  It was guilt, which Wallis saw on Dudley’s face—different from a land- or greed-guilt. It was the guilt of not-loving, and the shame of not being able to love.

  Finally Dudley forced himself to say something—“Jesus,” he said—and the sound of Dudley’s voice seemed to draw Matthew up out of his shock and back among them. He sat up this time, pronounced that he was all right, and pulled himself free of the screwdriver. There was a sucking pop as he did so, a small sound, like a fish rising to sip at some delicate mayfly.

  “It didn’t get anything,” Matthew said, holding his gloved hands over the wound. “I know it didn’t. I’d feel it, if it got something important.” Steam rose from his breath, and from the wound. It was beginning to snow harder. The engine was running rough, so that Matthew was having to shout. Dudley reached down and shut the engine off.