Where the Sea Used to Be

by Rick Bass

  “Just flesh and muscle,” Matthew said. Now he might have noticed the strange stillness on Dudley’s face—the nothingness—because he said, “Honest.” He held his gloved hand out—the falling snow sticking like feathers to the bright red blood on the glove. “Lookit,” he said. “Liver blood would be darker. The stomach and intestines would have some green in ’em. Just blood,” he said. “It’s nothing. It’s just a hole.”

  Still Dudley was silent, nearly expressionless, and unmoving: as if worried that it was he, Dudley, who was in danger of being betrayed.

  Matthew went over to one of the empty jerry cans and shook from it the last sips of gas, directly onto both the entrance and exit wounds. Then he tore his shirttail into strips and rolled them up into little balls and plugged the wounds.

  “Let’s go,” Matthew said. “Sixteen thousand feet. The home stretch. We’ve still got a couple of hours of light left.”

  Old Dudley’s legs were buckling. His face still had that strange mask of nothingness to it, but now his legs were quivering. He sat straight down in the snow and waited for his nausea, or his weakness, to pass.

  The snow was piling up on all of them—on their shoulders, on their backs.

  “I’m fine,” Matthew said. “I shouldn’t be, but I am.” He started climbing up the steep steps, back up to the rig floor.

  But the engine wouldn’t start, when they tried it again. Dudley fooled with it—his hands shaking—and got the engine to run for a minute or two, enough to get the mud circulating again, but then the engine began to clatter, and shut down again.

  They went up on the rig floor to where Matthew was sitting. He was looking out at the river and at the woods. Wallis thought with a shock that he looked like what Old Dudley must have looked like, thirty-five or forty years ago.

  The three of them sat on the silent rig floor with their legs dangling over the edge as if sitting on a dock. The scent of the gasoline Matthew had swabbed on his wounds was strong, though Wallis worried not so much about it as he did about the grime that had been on the screwdriver.

  It kept snowing. One last flock of geese, coming down from Canada, flew down the river, silent through the falling snow. The men could see the snow on the geese’s broad backs as they flew, so that it was as if they had hatched full-grown from the snow—had been born in winter. Another smaller band of geese came flying in at a tangent and joined the main flock, like two streams coming together to form a larger stream. They continued their flight down the river.

  “I could have kept going,” Matthew said.

  “Maybe you should go in and get it looked at,” Wallis said.

  Matthew scowled. “Go in where?” he said.

  “What will happen to the hole?” Wallis asked.

  Old Dudley shook his head and looked up at the snow. “Six county fairs and a goat roping,” he said, “and I never fuckin’ saw anything like it.” He glanced at Matthew’s wound, then looked up at the snow again.

  “The pipe’s going to get stuck, without the mud circulating,” Matthew said. “Same as if your blood stopped moving. We’re going to lose the hole. We’re almost there, and we’re going to lose it.”

  “You don’t know if we’re almost there or not,” Dudley said. “You just know it’s down there. But you don’t know exactly where. It could be another hundred feet, or it could be another five thousand.”

  Matthew swung his feet lightly, like a child. “We’re going to lose it,” he said matter-of-factly. “Will you start over again, when we do?”

  “Hell yes,” Dudley said. “But we ain’t going to lose it.” He patted the rig floor. “You probably think the hole goes straight down, don’t you?” he said to Wallis. “Well it doesn’t. It’s torqued way the fuck out there, somewhere.” He pointed out to the river. “It could be on the other side of that river. It could be under that island. It could be back up under that snaggley-ass forest, over a quarter mile away. It’s like a big boner,” he said, “and a woman—the way it bends way around, once you get up inside her. It can bend way left, or way right—can go way up, too. There’s no way in hell sixteen thousand feet of hungry pipe is going to go straight down, like a plumb-bob. The earth has her desires, her muscles, too—she’s going to take and bend that steel pipe and guide it in to the oil.”

  “You’re a sick motherfucker,” Matthew said. “You ought not to talk that way.”

  “What do you know about it?” Dudley asked. “You haven’t learned shit yet. I’ve lost more holes than you’ll ever drill.”

  Wallis had thought at first that they were joking with each other, but it seemed that for some unknowable reason they had both crossed some invisible line, a line which had moved or been pushed closer by frustration and fatigue.

  “You don’t know shit,” Old Dudley continued. He was talking like an old man now—as if now that the well’s drilling was suspended, he was losing any remaining traces of vitality he might have been conserving—as if it were draining back down the hole. “Look at you,” he scoffed. “When are you ever going to be anything other than a fucking hayseed? Plugging yourself up with a wad of cloth.” He snorted. “I tell you what,” he said, “I should have known something like this would happen. I had a nightmare last night. I dreamed I was fucking a woman and all of a sudden my dick went soft, and I was just humping away with a big old soft bunch of nothing. It was a damn bad dream,” he said. “I thought maybe I’d already come, is why it had all gone soft, but no, it had just gone soft. A fucking nightmare,” he said. “Let me tell you, I knew it was one bad-ass omen.”

  They sat a while longer. “Good,” Dudley groused, “a blizzard. Lovely. A gott-damn blizzard. Fucking nature. Fucking evil bitch. Come on,” he said, “let’s get out of this shit.”

  By the time they got to the drift-boat, the snow was up over their ankles. Matthew was moving easily, as if nothing had happened: just a flesh wound, and as if the screwdriver’s blade had purposely sought the one path through his body that would avoid piercing anything vital. He waded out into the river and held the boat steady while the others climbed in. Old Dudley was a bit tottery, like someone’s grandfather.

  As ever, Dudley slept, crossing the river—slept on the bottom of the boat with the snow falling all around them and the night coming in fast, as if made bolder by the falling snow.

  For two days Dudley cursed into the telephone, trying to find someone he could pay to come into the dark wilderness, while Matthew hung around the schoolyard or, feeling increasingly unwelcome, unfitted to his own town, camped in the snow beneath a little tarp under Helen’s tree.

  On the third day the rig workers came back into the valley, bold and brazen as ravens, searching out Old Dudley, looking for work, even as he was still on the phone, cursing. All the things that had been said between them on their way out, their exodus from the fire, were forgotten, or ignored. They needed the money.

  Next came the hunters, two days later—the opening weekend of rifle season. They surged over the snowy pass in big trucks with snow tires and chains. They loved their vehicles and stayed in them constantly, cruising the road back and forth, hoping for a lucky shot at some roadside creature.

  The workers repaired the engine, jury-rigged it, and resumed drilling the well, carving away only a hundred feet a day now. Wallis could not help but think of a big cat nearing its final stalk on its prey, sinking to its belly in the last distance and creeping. Mel kept right on teaching, one day after another, as if disregarding the fact that her world was only inches away from being cracked open. She taught one day at a time, until it seemed almost to her that the cumulative sum of her work, and the dispersal of it among those students, was in some way, subtle at first but then stronger, disempowering the rig and the three men’s desires. Or if not that, disempowering her own terror.

  For Dudley it was as when a woman he was with was almost undressed: almost.

  For Matthew it was as when one has a headache or fever, but is finally almost ready to drift off into sleep.<
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  For Wallis it was like a huge luxury, a curiosity. After this well was over, he knew he could turn his back and walk away. He just knew it.

  The rig workers came and went, with their barge running again. And the road hunters continued to prowl, so that now there was sporadically through the day the sound of gunfire, bursts of three and four and five shots at a time. Some days Mel would stare out her window from the schoolhouse and think, You should have seen it twenty years ago. And when the road hunters went home with their bounty and lied to their wives about the circumstances in which it had been procured, they said, “It’s like stepping back in time a hundred years.”

  Mel and Wallis went out into the charred smokehouse, as if believing they might have overlooked some scrap of meat. It was time to shoot a deer and, if possible, an elk. They stood in the total emptiness of the smokehouse: nothing left but a few dark spots of blood-drip on the bare soil. They wanted meat so badly, were sick of beans and squash—Mel wanted it more than ever, and imagined that she could feel the tiny one inside her desiring it—but she knew that Wallis did not want to be gone far from the rig when the oil was found.

  Matthew had volunteered to help get her meat again this year, as he had every year, and, not knowing how to reject his offer, she had accepted. It had occurred to her that perhaps getting back out into the woods would help halt his errant arc; this soul-jettisoning plummet he insisted on completing—but that was no longer any real business of hers, and she knew in her heart Old Dudley would never let him leave the earth alive.

  Still, even in his diminished state, he was a far better hunter than Wallis, and she thought it kind of him to offer; both for the getting of the meat itself, and for the instruction he could give Wallis.

  The well snapped a leg; a cross-brace broke its weld, tipping the whole rig fifteen degrees toward earth one night. Miraculously, the pipe did not get stuck, but there was a two-day delay while they waited for giant hydraulic jacks to come and erect the tower once more. Dudley fumed and howled, swore he should go back to Houston and check in on all his other prospects, but could not tear himself away from this one. They were down below sixteen thousand feet and the pay could come at any minute. They got the well drilling again but had not been running for more than a few hours before the weld on another leg snapped, tipping the rig fifteen degrees in the other direction.

  The hydraulic jacks had just left and could not get back for another two days. Finally they came and made those repairs, but a day later—the first of November—the engine broke again, meaning a week’s delay.

  Old Dudley was so mad that he was biting the insides of his own cheeks until blood trickled from the pulpy wounds inside. His rheumy eyes leaked tears of self-pity. He believed sincerely they were only inches away. Mel laughed, feeling a secret power surging within her. She knew it was not her desire, her wishes alone, that were toppling the rig, any more than it was Dudley’s or Matthew’s desires that had torched the woods. But still she felt pleasure, and a silent strength.

  A man was dispatched, like a messenger from ancient times, to get the required parts. He would drive out of the valley. A day later he would catch a flight, then fly all day. He would drive to the rig yards in Louisiana and spend a day or more searching among hulking, rusting giants for the right parts. He would fly back north—another day. Then he would drive back to the valley, if the roads were not snowed out. Another day would be spent repairing the engine and replacing the broken parts. Perhaps they would get it right the first time, and the engine would start again. If they did, Wallis and Matthew would be able to hear the drumming of engine, the squeal and torque and clatter of pipe, and could turn around and head back in. It would take another full day or two to circulate out the old mud and fill the hole with clean new mud, and so there would be time for Wallis and Matthew to get back before the truth was reached.

  They packed lightly: a hatchet, a bone saw, and a tarp to use as a tent; matches, knives, a compass for blizzards. Two sleeping bags. One rifle, for Matthew; Wallis’s responsibility would be to pack and to learn. The plan was to shoot a giant bull up high, where the bulls had gone to isolate themselves, and then to pack it down in stages—four loads of a hundred and twenty-five pounds each, plus the antlers and hide. They would also shoot a big deer on the way out, down near the valley floor, so they wouldn’t have to carry it as far. They would try to accumulate a bounty of grouse, as well, though they’d have to kill them silently, by throwing stones or catching them with their bare hands; they couldn’t risk shooting and scaring off the elk. They would catch and kill ruffed grouse down in the pine bottoms, and spruce grouse in the cedar jungles, and finally the enormous blue grouse up on the snowy ridges.

  Later in the season, Mel could shoot another deer, if they thought they needed more meat.

  They all had dinner over at Mel’s the night before they left. Amy and the baby rode over on the pony and brought a deer roast to cook. Dudley walked in front of them, holding the pony’s halter. Mel was happy to see them, and glad for the meat. She began seasoning it and basting it with butter and brown sugar, to bake in the wood stove; lining it with small potatoes and onions from the garden. She still had told no one of her pregnancy, though she longed to share the news with Amy, with anyone.

  They ate by firelight and candlelight, and afterward, Mel got a book of poems from the bookshelf and settled back on the couch, lean as a cat. She began to read out loud.

  “Aww, fuck,” Dudley complained, but Amy hushed him and said she wanted to listen.

  Matthew listened to the poems for a while but then got up and went over to his rifle and took it apart and began oiling it, and checking and rechecking the packs.

  Dudley crept a couple of laps around the cabin—the baby awoke when he passed her, and she eyed him intently—and then he dressed in a parka and high boots and went outside to lead the pony down to the smokehouse, so that it wouldn’t have to spend the night standing in the snow.

  “If he lives long enough, he’ll be a decent human being by the time he dies,” Mel said, amazed.

  “I have been talking to him about the golden rule,” Amy confided.

  “Not a chance,” Matthew said, reassembling his rifle. He yawned, then started down the hall toward Mel’s room before stopping, remembering, and for a long moment he stood there, captured in his mistake. Finally he turned and came back into the main room, gathered a couple of elk hides, and went into the kitchen, where he prepared a pallet. Soon he was snoring, and Mel thought, with some surprise, He doesn’t miss me at all. Even with no one to replace me, he is not lonely.

  Dudley came back inside. He stamped the snow from his boots, awakening the baby, who began to cry. Amy gathered her up and the three of them—father, mother, daughter—sat on the couch, and the baby calmed again.

  “If I leave, I might not be able to get back in,” he said. “If I stay, I might not be able to get back out. Gott-damn, I’ve got my dick in a wringer.”

  “Teat in a wringer,” Amy corrected him.

  “That too,” Dudley said. “The whole shittaree.”

  Amy lay down on the couch with the baby. Dudley lay down on the floor next to them, after covering Amy and Mary with a hide, and then himself.

  Mel and Wallis went to their room, where they looked out the tiny window at the falling snow.

  “I’ll be glad when they’re all gone,” Mel said.

  “They’ll always keep coming back,” Wallis said.

  “It’s scary, all this snow falling, and us not having any meat,” Mel said.

  “Do we have enough wood?”

  “You can never have enough wood,” Mel said.

  They undressed and made love quietly, slowly, on the floor, not the jouncy bed, feeling like thieves: trying to match the snows silence. Four hours later they were up and fixing breakfast. Wallis kissed Mel good-bye; Matthew nodded to her—she smiled, thanked him, reached out and squeezed his hand—and they stepped out into the snow, which was still falling hard.
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  They snowshoed down the trail and then turned up a side canyon of leafless aspen, heading into the mountains above them, silent on their snowshoes. They breathed heavily at first, unaccustomed to the rhythm of that particular labor, but moved strongly, their lungs filling easily in the cold air.

  They crossed no tracks that day: the snow was still too fresh, the storm ongoing: all the animals were bedded down, waiting it out. For a while a pair of ravens followed them silently through the woods, through the falling snow, but they never made a sound, called out neither encouragement nor warning.

  “What are you thinking about?” Matthew asked suddenly, when they stopped to rest. The sweat was pouring down them, and though Wallis was overheated, he knew he would grow quickly cold when they stopped moving.

  Wallis started to tell him the truth—about Mel being pregnant—but instead said “Nothing,” and Matthew stared at him—the ends of his hair beginning to freeze with small icicles. Matthew grunted and said, “Good, because there are elk just over this next rise.”

  There were no tracks, and the rise was too high for him to have seen over it, but now the swirling winds brought their scent to Wallis, so strong and unmistakable that he didn’t see how he could have missed it, and Matthew said, “Get your head out of your ass. Hunting’s the one thing you can’t fuck up at. You owe it to the animal you’re about to kill”—and they crept up over the ridge. The elk were about fifty yards in front of them, bedded down in the snow beneath some scattered lodgepoles, a different elk beneath each tree. Some elk were bunched up together out in the open, as if in a barnyard, snow covering their backs as they lay resting. Their yellow hides seemed to glow, the only color in the storm, and Wallis and Matthew scanned the herd quickly, searching for antlers. There were a few spike bulls and rag-horns in the herd—their antlers rising above them like small nests—and still the elk did not see or notice them, though Wallis could feel that he and Matthew were being watched, and that time was moving away quickly now—that they had only a few seconds left in which to study and analyze the situation, and then to choose whether to act.