Where the Sea Used to Be

by Rick Bass

  “They don’t make any sound, do they?” Artie asked. “They’re not like geese.”

  “No,” Matthew said. “Except once. Right before they die. It’s the only sound they make in their whole life. That’s why they call it a swan song. They lie down and stretch out their neck and whistle. It’s not a pretty sound—not at all like you’d think. It’s horrible.”

  “Did you ever hear one?” Wallis asked. “A dying swan?”

  “Sure,” Matthew said. He shrugged. “When I was a kid I roped one from the dock. I baited it into a snare and threw the rope over its neck. Somehow I got it dragged up on the shore before it could take off flying. It might have carried me off with it. I tied the rope around a tree and then killed it.”

  “How did you kill it?” Artie asked.

  “Stones,” said Matthew—as if in a trance, now. “It took so many of them.”

  “Did the swan do it?” Wallis asked. “Did it sing?”

  “Yes,” said Matthew.

  Old Dudley came riding in on Amy’s pony, layered in coats and furs, so that he looked like some creature from the forest. The pony was plowing through snow up to its belly. Anyone who was going to get out of the valley needed to do so soon, and he knew it.

  He saw the smoke rising from the mercantile’s chimney and with his heels prodded the pony into a trot. He rode right up onto the porch, and might have ridden the pony through the door had they not heard him coming and gone out to meet him.

  Old Dudley’s face was cherry-red, and the tong marks were betraying his mood, pulsing reptilian. “Care for a pancake?” Matthew asked.

  “If you two are through with fun and games,” Dudley said, “we’re drilling below eighteen thousand.” He turned to Wallis. “I want you to look at it and see what you think,” he said, “but it looks like we’re into basement rock, and have been for a motherfucking week. It looks like there’s not a gott-damn thing there. It looks like another motherfucking dry hole.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want a pancake?” Matthew asked. “They’re really good this morning.”

  It was the closest Wallis had seen Dudley come to striking Matthew. Artie excused himself, made a silent wish that Old Dudley would not be wintering in the valley.

  They walked down to the river to catch a ride over on the barge with the day shift. The day shift’s fire had only recently been extinguished, so that steam still rose from its blackened coals. Severed deer heads, shrouded in snow, hung from a pole lashed between two trees, and the scent of venison was all around.

  “They’re going native,” Matthew said. “Good. We can use them on the next well.” Again Dudley looked ready to strike Matthew, and even raised his hand.

  It was a thing Dudley might have said, twenty years earlier. Wallis glanced at Matthew and tried to imagine him standing out in an oil field somewhere, in a Louisiana bayou, or a Kansas wheatfield—one of Old Dudley’s many other operations—and, bent over and crooked and aching and hungry, announcing that he was going to drill to the bottom of the fucking world.

  The barge pilot let them off on the other shore. They crowded into a truck and drove toward the distant noise of the rig. The road was snow-rutted, frozen into a violent crust that boomed as they walked across it. It was a landscape of jagged teeth, as if the ocean had been frozen in a moment, with all whitecaps and waves halted. In the truck, the men asked if they would be going home soon.

  When they got to the rig—the high-intensity halogen lights flooding the wilderness, washing out all shadows—Dudley and Wallis and Matthew got out and stood there for a moment, watching the drill pipe spin, gleaming in the hole. The immensity of their failure. It felt to Wallis for the first time as if they had traveled a long way.

  Over the din of the rig, it seemed to Wallis that he could hear the metal of the rig contracting, groaning against the cold as the temperature sank like some weighted thing no longer able to stay above the surface. It had stopped snowing and the forest was glazed beneath mounds of new snow. In other places the crescent moon’s light cast a gleam over blue ice and silver ice, and there was a riot of wild stars.

  They went up on the rig floor and began examining the little bags of ground-up cuttings that Old Dudley had been saving for them in their absence. He was certain they held nothing but the Cambrian basement rock—the cold, sterile, igneous foundation of the crust, across which no life had ever traveled, and where there could hence be no oil—but Dudley wanted to see Matthew and Wallis acknowledge this—wanted to watch them fully examine and observe and hold their failure in their hands, as if to humiliate them.

  They looked at the dry cuttings for two hours—emptying out one little sample bag after another, as if emptying tiny bags of treasure: but it was all igneous, they had passed through any chance at all for life, and were deep into the basement—the useless, barren basement.

  “You vile little twat,” Old Dudley said to Wallis. “Eight million dollars, and the ridicule of my peers. Oh you little fucker. You come up here and take my boy’s girl from him and con us into believing your gott-damn stupid map . . . Oh you fuck-faced little rodent,” he said.

  Old Dudley’s eyes were starting to drift and cross, and he appeared dizzy. He sat down, steadied himself. He was panting, as he often did following his creeping, and the rank odor often associated with that began to arise from him. His face was gray. He looked down at his boots. A single teardrop fell on his boots. “Send them home,” he told Matthew. “Get me out of here,” he said. “Boy, get me out of here.”

  The river was beginning to freeze on either side of its banks, though it still ran dark and strong and deep through the center. They drove back to the river and signaled for the barge to come get them; and even before the barge reached them, Old Dudley went out onto the ice and swung feebly at it with an ax, as if to clear a lane for the huge ship. Wallis thought for sure he would punch through the ice and disappear, and be swept away from them. He kept flailing at the ice even after the barge had arrived, as if he had forgotten for what purpose he had been swinging the ax. He looked like a mortally injured animal in its death throes; and the barge slipped in through the crust of ice like a Russian ice-breaker, and Matthew went out on the ice and gently took the ax from Old Dudley, and lifted him up onto the barge.

  On the other shore, he said he was going to Amy’s to pack up, and for Matthew to be ready to leave in two hours. Matthew nodded, said he would be napping in the mercantile, and to come and wake him when they were ready. Wallis said he didn’t guess he would be seeing him again for a while, and reached out his hand to shake, but Old Dudley ignored it, climbed up on Amy’s pony, and set off up the road slumpshouldered. Matthew watched him leave, then went inside the mercantile to finish the leftover pancakes, and to sleep the sleep of the dead. Wallis went home to do the same.

  When Wallis awoke a day and a half later, and went back into town, the rig was gone, as was the barge, and the workers. It was snowing again. Wallis knocked at the mercantile door, went inside, where it was ice-cold, and found that Matthew was still sleeping. He went across the street. No one had seen Old Dudley or Amy, and they assumed he had left with the rig.

  Wallis went up the road to Amy’s. He saw the pony in its corral, and smoke from the chimney, but when he knocked at Amy’s door she said that no, she hadn’t seen him in two days, and had assumed that he had been staying out at the rig, or over at Mel’s, without having told her his plans.

  The town went searching for him. It was easy to cut transects on either side of the road between town and Amy’s cabin. Their only fear was that he might have stumbled into the river, and they would never find him. Mel was crying, as they searched. The snow was falling so heavily now that it was sealing off even the tracks of the searchers behind them. They poked and prodded beneath the snow with sticks and branches, feeling for a frozen arm, a frozen leg.

  They found him shortly before dusk. He was sitting under a spruce tree in a jumble of boughs and branches, with a sheet of snow over him, blu
e but alive, barely. He was not conscious. He had not made it two hundred yards past the spot where he had left Matthew and Wallis, upon returning from the dry hole.

  They carried him in to the mercantile, took him upstairs, and laid him in Helen’s old bed and warmed the store up as hot as they could get it.

  He roused to consciousness, pained, shortly before midnight. Mel knew if he survived he would probably lose both arms and legs to frostbite, and was praying for him not to make it.

  He was coughing, as pneumonia set in—drowning in his own lungs; and in a delirium he muttered words that at first she could not understand, but which upon leaning closer, she heard clearly: “Hungry. I’m so hungry.”

  There were candles lit all around his bed. He didn’t recognize her, didn’t recognize anyone or anything. Amy was asleep with the baby downstairs. Matthew was asleep downstairs, snoring. Wallis was sitting up with Mel, rocking in a rocking chair. Old Dudley’s breath came harder, in rattles and wheezes: he coughed, hacked, struggled to suck in enough air to breathe, to live, as if sucking in air through the tiniest of straws. They could both see and feel his life leaving him now like an upturned leaf floating down a river.

  He roused once to lucidity. His tong marks lay smooth and flat, looking by some trick of candlelight to have almost disappeared, so that to Mel it was shocking—as if she were seeing a glimpse of who he might have been, had he been normal. He sat up and looked at her impassively, then over at Wallis in the corner, in his rocking chair, and scowled. He raised a crooked finger and pointed to Wallis, started to say something, but was seized by more death-coughing.

  Mel went to him and took him by both shoulders. She shook him lightly but firmly. Her last chance to say it. “What,” she said, “what do you have to recommend you?”

  Anything. She wanted him to say anything—even to utter indecipherable gibberish. She couldn’t think of a thing, but believed that he, surely now, if never before, could answer it.

  He lay back in the deathbed, turned his face away from her, and said, “Nothing,” and died.

  Amy had heard Mel’s hissed whisperings and had hurried up the steps with the baby Mary, for Dudley to hold one last time. She wept at having missed him and placed the baby on the dead man’s chest, and laid her own head down on his chest and cried sobs of frustration and loneliness. Mel sat stony. Wallis went over and stood behind her with both hands on her shoulders.

  After some time, Amy lifted her teary face and asked Mel, “What did he say? I missed it. What were his last words?”

  Mel stared at her blankly, as if through the vast clear waters of a deep lake. Her mind did not seem to want to stir, but finally the words came to her, and she told Amy, “He said to tell you and Mary that there is great glory in life.”

  Amy began to cry again, and picked up the baby and held her close to her, and whispered in the baby’s ear, “Did you hear that, little girl? Your daddy said that there is great glory in life.”

  Epilogue

  THEY KEPT HIM ON BLOCKS OF ICE IN AN EMPTY GARAGE while Joshua worked on his coffin, working furiously to beat the freeze-up. Mel had given Matthew charge of all Dudley’s properties, and Matthew had gone home to Houston, saying that he did not want to see the burial: that he wanted to believe the old man had not been found in the snow, but was instead still out there somewhere, wandering, and that he might yet show up again someday.

  They kept him stiff on blocks of ice set atop boards laid across sawhorses, and kept little fires burning in a ring around him to keep the wild animals from breaking in and bothering him.

  Joshua worked fast, working day and night in the same garage in which Dudley lay in repose, withering in the great cold. Joshua warmed his hands by the little fires as he worked, and when he had the ship finished, a twenty-foot scow in the shape of the full bare body of a woman, everyone came over from the bar and helped sand it and then paint it green. The woman in whose body he rode, the Malachite Woman, had long black hair carved back from the brow, and full bared breasts that would ride just above the water line. Her green eyes were haunting, as real as anything Joshua had ever done: as if the ship yet might come to life, or as if a soul inhabited it.

  On ice, Old Dudley had shrunk to half his normal size, like some desiccated salamander. They gave the green paint a full night and day to dry and on the next night carried the ship down to the freezing river with him in it.

  There was a brief debate about whether to set the ship afire or not, but Mel, after considering it, said no; just send him on down with a lantern in the bow.

  The lantern was lit and placed. Dudley was lying on his back staring up at the sky, with his hands folded peacefully over his chest, and a bear hide draped over him for warmth. A light snow was falling.

  They shoved the boat out across the ice and slipped it into the dark fast flowing water, then stepped back wordlessly as the boat was taken quickly from them.

  The town watched through the curtain of falling snow as the boat, lit by its one lantern as if up on a stage amidst all-else-darkness, bobbed in the current, hurrying south between the snowy shores. The Malachite Woman’s head, immense, like that of a dragon, rose high above the water. She stared resolutely, eagerly, downstream. The ship moved quickly away, riding and pitching on the little waves. It began to snow harder. The lantern disappeared.

  Mel was crying, squeezing Wallis’s hand. People stared into the darkness where he had gone—where the Malachite Woman had taken him—and then started trudging up the hill through knee-deep snow, back toward the bar.

  “Why are you crying?” Wallis asked. “What’s the matter? He couldn’t live forever.”

  The snow was pressing down on them. They could barely hear the river’s gurgling against the muffled silence of the snow.

  “I’m so happy,” Mel said.

  They headed home on snowshoes. She wanted to be sure the boat was leaving the valley, so they climbed a ridge and followed the river south for a ways, until they caught back up with the dim sight of the boat: the lantern still glowing.

  There they, and only they, watched it disappear a second time. Nothing else was moving; no other animals were about. They went home to their cabin. In bed, Mel took Wallis’s hands and pressed them to the warm small mound of her stomach. It would be a thousand years, she hoped, before the valley saw anyone like Old Dudley again. Ten thousand years.

  They awoke in the morning to blue sky and a world of deep white silence. They fixed breakfast and then struck out on snowshoes across the smoothness of untouched snow.

  Acknowledgments

  I am extremely grateful to James Linville and George Plimpton of the Paris Review, who first expressed confidence in this story, and to Houghton Mifflin, and to the late Sam Lawrence, who asked for this book, and to Joan Williams, who first brought it to his attention. I am grateful to Harry Foster, who has helped it through various drafts, and to Camille Hykes, who has also been working closely with the story for many years. I’m grateful also to Dorothy Henderson, for extraordinarily generous editorial help, and to The New Yorker and Bomb, in which sections of this book appeared in different form.

  I am grateful for the support and advice from my agent, Bob Dattila, and to my friends and family and community. I’m grateful as ever to Russell Chatham, for the cover’s painting, and to Stuart Klipper, for the interior photographs; to the James Jones Society, for the support and encouragement offered by the James Jones First Novel Fellowship; to Melodie Wertelet and Michaela Sullivan for the book’s design; to Donna de La Perriere and Katie Dillin for production assistance; to my typist, Angi Young; to Tom Jenks, for editorial direction; and for use, in part, of the old Chautauqua papers by Alexander Winchell: his Walks and Talks in the Geological Field. I am grateful to the Guggenheim Foundation for the gift of a fiction fellowship.

  I cannot thank my editors enough for help with this story. Finally, I am indebted to the vanishing wild landscape of northwest Montana itself. There still exists a health and strength—a magic—i
n its last vital cores. Whether these cores can be protected for the future or not, I do not know; but I hope for their continued existence and am grateful for having known them.

  About the Author

  RICK BASS’s fiction has received O. Henry Awards, numerous Pushcart Prizes, awards from the Texas Institute of Letters, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. Most recently, his memoir Why I Came West was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award.