The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness

by Rick Bass

  Maybe he’s changed, Judith thinks.

  She can’t move a muscle. The river roars.

  Maybe he’s well, Judith thinks.

  Then she thinks about the myths of bears, versus the facts. She debates: freedom, or hope? Quitting—flight—or pushing on? Does her freedom—river freedom—even exist?

  She gnaws at the snare. It takes her a long time, but she’s able to pull free of it. This notion, coming seemingly from nowhere, that he still loves her, is confounding her efforts.

  The log’s so heavy. She can’t lift it. With her broken shoulder she tunnels away at soft earth and then gravel, scoops out a depression barely deep enough to slither out from under the big log.

  The river is just below. She hears Trapper coming up the other ridge, howling. Judith careens through the trees, running for the river, tripping and falling, her arm and shoulder sticking out crookedly like a bird’s crippled wing. Her big curved feet keep tripping her, but she’s up and running each time she falls, the earth sending jolts of pain up through her jaws and into her ears.

  The diamond rushing waters of the river glitter.

  There won’t be time to build a raft.

  She hits the water as she hit the window the night she busted out of the cabin, but this time he is right with her, on top of her, and is hauling her back out of the river.

  She thrashes, broken-armed, like a bird: starts to strike at and bite him, but sees, in a glimpse—a passing shadow, a passing wave of light—a thing almost like tenderness, even concern, in his face, and she does not strike or bite. She pauses, held in his grip.

  She feels some part of her escape with the current—her other life, the mythical one. She feels, too, the second life—the real life, also just as mythical—the one he has in his grip once more.

  “Listen,” he says. “I’ll be nice. I missed you. Listen,” he says, stroking her hair as if he means to scalp it. “Oh, I love you,” he says.

  They fall back into being as they were before: as if caught in some cycle too powerful and terrible to escape. As if they might as well be trying to escape the seasons.

  He sleeps with his hand tight on her wrist. He doesn’t get better, but he doesn’t die, either. They just settle into the soil, and their lives again, like rotting trees, and the world passes over them. They keep on trapping things.

  Judith dreams for a month or two of how things might have been if she’d hit the river a step or two sooner, but then those dreams fade, as if they are far downstream now, or eroded, or forgotten.

  I probably would have drowned, she thinks. I probably would not have made it.

  She goes back to the old life, helping him tend traps. She feels cut in half, but strangely, there is no pain.

  “Say it again,” she tells him, nights when she thinks she must hit the window again at full stride: “Say that you love me.”

  “Oh, I do,” he says, stroking her hair. “I do.”

  “Say it,” she says, gripping his wrist.

  Where the Sea Used to Be

  “Daily it is forced home on the mind of the geologist, that nothing, not even the wind that blows, is so unstable as the level of the crust of this earth.”

  —Charles Darwin

  THEY MET BEFORE MIDNIGHT AT THE HOUSE OF THE richest man in Mississippi, and left shortly thereafter with a dark leather country doctor’s satchel that was bulging with money, bulging as if trying to breathe, swollen like a dying fish’s gills: they were unable to even shut it all the way. There was no moon. Because one of the dogs was sick they had to drive slowly, and the old man had to urinate every forty minutes. The truck was old, because they did not want to appear conspicuous. They had coffee in Starkville, urinated in Columbus, and crossed over the state line of Alabama at dawn. The sun was orange and promising as they came down through the tall pines; no traffic was on the road yet, and there was smoke in only a few of the chimneys, rising blue and straight. It was October.

  “I like to be traveling at this time of day,” Harry told Jack. Harry had slept between stops the entire drive. Soft fog blanketed the lowest meadows; Holsteins and Angus grazed. It had rained in the night, lightly, before their arrival: that smell was in the air. The road was black and narrow and wound down through the heavy trees, and there was greenness in the small meadows that had been cleared by hand, and by mule, the stumps burned. Fieldstones were stacked around the boundaries of the meadows. There were old barns and tool sheds.

  “You can rip up those nasty barns and make picture frames of ‘em,” Harry told Jack, and laughed. “People in the city’ll pay money for those things.” He eyed the occasional ancient shed with a steady, labored look as they passed each one, pausing in his heavy breathing, not even hawking phlegm, so that Jack was alarmed into picturing them driving out into the field, hooking up to the porch or a window frame with a rope, and driving off, pulling the scatter of buildings down like dominoes. Stacking the wood in the back of the truck. Driving on, deeper into the heart of Alabama, to enter, to take. Harry was seventy-two, the boss. The peace and freshness of the morning made Jack not mind anything. His life was set before him. The dogs awoke and began tumbling about in the back: jawing, yipping, fighting. The poor one feeling better.

  The sun rose over a hill as they reached the Vernon city limits. Harry said he was hungry. They were on an expense account. He ate six eggs and three biscuits. Jack fed and watered the dogs and scratched their ears. Dudley had said the dogs would be as valuable as the satchel. People still thought Dudley could find oil. It was the last hurrah.

  The dogs had been purchased late the afternoon before, from the Animal Rescue League, and were along because there was a man who was already working up in north Alabama, a man named Wallis Featherston, who had a dog, and the people whose oil and gas leases he was buying knew, or believed, they could trust a man who loved dogs. Wallis had worked in a menial job for Dudley Estes for several years, but was now on his own, taking small bits and pieces of leases and then selling his ideas to other, larger companies, larger than even Old Dudley—companies that Dudley wanted some day to equal: Shell, Phillips, Texaco—who would go in and buy the remaining leases in the prospect and drill the wells, and Wallis would be able to participate for a percent or two or three. It was said that Wallis was getting his leases very cheaply, because he was country, like the people he was leasing from—bone raw and country, rusty and gravel, a people of cold winters, rainy springs, and hard farming—and Wallis had a dog, which rode around with him everywhere. Wallis had a plane, too: he flew around, looking at things.

  So Harry’s and Jack’s boss, Old Dudley, had decided to go with what worked. Old Dudley was sixty years old, a billionaire, and for some reason was chasing this ex-clerk: trying to catch up with his successes in the oil fields. Wallis was twenty-eight, and slept in a field in his sleeping bag, or in the truck, when it rained. He hadn’t participated in a dry hole yet. He’d hit on thirteen straight wells. He had named his dog Dudley.

  Jack ordered ham for breakfast. The sausages and hams were good up in these hills. The farmers wore overalls and straw hats and spoke with nasal twists and risings of the language, and still used mules, red championship ones from Tennessee. The country was too tough for tractors. There were also sawmills, a few.

  Jack smiled at one of the waitresses. None of the girls were pretty, and they all looked the same, like a hundred plain sisters. He would find one, though, an outsider, passing through, like himself. She would be smitten with the promise of youth and the adventure of his working for Old Dudley. There was a heavy padlocked chain around the satchel. The key to the lock was on a necklace over Jack’s chest. The key against his skin felt like a woman’s hand, sometimes; the heat. It made him dizzy. He wanted to do good, for Dudley. The dogs barked and played, outside. People went to the window and asked what kind they were.

  ***

  Wallis sat out in the field where he camped, with his maps in his lap, checking leases. A landowner in the area, a woman, brought him som
e lunch: chicken, creamed corn, biscuits, all of it still hot. It was in a straw basket with a cloth over the top. People were discovering the basin: it hadn’t been drilled for over seventy years. The day was bright, and there was newness; you could smell oil in the air, too. No one knew where it was coming from—there were no wells in the area, hunters had never found any seeps along the creeks—but it had the heady smell of live oil, black. Dudley had drilled eight dry holes in the little valley. Wallis loved to lunch there often. He had saved the dog Dudley from being killed by a bird hunter: speechless, furious at the dog’s ineptitude, his inability to point birds, the man had been aiming his gun at the dog when Wallis, out walking, came up on them. Wallis bought the dog for all the money he had in his pocket, a dollar and sixty-seven cents, and named him Dudley, because he couldn’t hunt.

  ***

  “It’s a hot summer,” Wallis said aloud, to himself. Though it was mid-October, it seemed coldness would never come. In the warmth everything tasted good. He shut his eyes. There had to be some trick; he had to be missing something. He was too happy. There was very much the urge to be cautious: to suspect a fall.

  He flew: long, lazy circles over towns and woods, flying low and slow: peeling an apple as he flew, sometimes. Looking for the thing, the thing no one else knew to look for yet, though he knew they would find it, and rip it into shreds. He considered falling in love.

  ***

  He sat on the porch of people’s houses, and discussed leisurely the business of finding oil. He scratched his dog’s ears, and talked hunting. He ate dinner; he took their leases, writing a personal check, and became friends with the people. His jeans and shirts were always clean. He didn’t worry about his happiness too much. It was always there. He could count on it. In the years 1902, 1903, and then again in 1917, there had been some wells drilled in the basin. Then nothing for years and years. Now they were coming back. His heart had been broken, like anyone else’s, so very long ago, and unfairly. It didn’t matter now. He didn’t even think of her name anymore. It didn’t even matter, now.

  The basin was an ancient, mysterious, buried dry sea: scooped out deep into the old earth more than three hundred million years ago and then filled slowly with sand, from an old ocean, waves lapping at empty shores—an Age of Sharks, thousands of varieties of sharks in the warm waters in those days—hundreds of miles of empty beaches, a few plants, windy days, warmth, no one to see anything, the most mysterious sea that ever was—and then, slowly, the sea had left again, and the dunes, the bays, were covered up by millions and millions of years: swamps first, then deserts, then mountains, then river country, carrying parts of the mountains back down to the same sea, older, farther south...

  The basin and its history lay hidden, and no one ever knew it was there, and the oil and gas from all its lives and warmth were only two thousand feet below the green and growing things of the present. It had been ten thousand feet below, at one time, but erosion and time were stripping back down, coming back closer to it, as if trying to get back to the old beaches, and those times.

  The woods were full of pine trees. The hills were steep: they stretched up into the Appalachians, they were the foothills, crumpled, of the Appalachians. The people were terribly wiry and most of them had never seen a beach. Wallis had helped discover the basin’s existence. When he walked through the woods and it was quiet, he tried to imagine the sound the old waves had made: miles and miles of empty beach: nothing there, nor would there be, ever. Doomed, and sealed. A beach missing something, but beautiful. Pine straw beneath his feet.

  ***

  A late night in one of the three little restaurants in Vernon: Harry and Jack, eating again, dessert and coffee, the only ones in the place, save for waitresses: near closing time. Going over some leases to be looked at the next day. The money bag, chained to the table, at their feet.

  “Get what you can,” said Harry, eyes merry, leaning forward over his stomach: waiting, for Jack to join in, and finish the singsong phrase he’d made up.

  “Can what you get,” said Jack tiredly.

  Harry laughed and leaned back. “Poison the rest!” he cried. Tears came to his eyes. Old Dudley’s strategy regarding the newfound basin was less than brilliant, but effective: if they leased everything that was available, then surely some of it would contain oil. Harry thought Wallis’s string of successful wells, of having never participated in a dry hole, was a little dainty, foppish.

  “These little pissant two- and three-acre leases,” he growled. “Shit almighty, a man can’t make a living off those things. Shit almighty he can’t even buy groceries on them. He can just barely get his money back, so he can go out and buy another two acres.” They had tied up, for ten years, over a thousand acres belonging to a family called the Stanfords that afternoon—they would probably never drill it—and another hundred and fifty from the Woodvilles, for five years.

  Harry ordered another piece of pie. “A man that won’t take a risk on what he believes in, and sink it all on one well—a man like that, who can’t take a big lease, has got a short hooter.”

  He cut into the second piece of pie, breathing hard.

  ***

  Wallis lived in the field, had been in the field for three years, since the time he left Old Dudley’s employ, and he liked it: the smells. He rolled his maps out on the hood. Only on the very hardest of freezing nights, or sometimes for a day or two in the middle of a drought-filled summer, would he come into town and get a room at Mrs. Brown’s Motel. He didn’t have much money. There was some good income from the few wells he was in, but he turned it all back into still more leases. Mrs. Brown let him use her typewriter when he was ready to make a lease final. Neither of them ever had money. Mrs. Brown was sixty-five and her husband had been killed in a mugging one night at the motel desk four sad years ago. The car that got away had Illinois plates and they never saw it again. Mrs. Brown had a gas well on her land that Wallis had helped get drilled. The rooms were $16.50 a night, and she let him keep Dudley in his room.

  Mrs. Brown was violently cheerful. She lived in the motel office, had a small kitchen and folding sofa bed back there, a television and a coffee maker, and it was almost as if she were waiting for the muggers to return.

  “Evening,” Wallis would say, when he came into the office. Bells would jangle over the threshold: a warning signal.

  “Right,” Mrs. Brown would say. Grief had made her grim, and she smiled like a skeleton. If she tried to speak even an entire sentence it would dissolve and there would be tears. She had loved her husband beyond what was healthy. Wallis was a little wary, uneasy, sometimes, around Mrs. Brown. But he liked her.

  “Cold,” Wallis would say, grinning at her.

  “Single digits,” she would say, the lower lip trembling between the two words: the challenging smile, leading with her chin. Daring anyone to say she was not happy. Wallis would become a little too sad to talk to her for very long.

  ***

  Harry and Jack always stayed there. They used up all the hot water when they took their long showers. Anyone staying in the motel could hear Harry’s wet coughs, his violent hacks. Wallis would read with Dudley’s head in his lap, and sometimes his thoughts would drift, and he’d wonder, wonder hard, about Jack: picturing himself—briefly, for a few almost unimaginable seconds—the way one sometimes imagines being in jail—holed up in that room with Harry.

  The coughs would burst out into the night: almost exactly when the ringing from the last one had just disappeared, thinned away to nothing, and the beautiful night silence and clarity of Alabama blackness was beginning to build back up—smoke, up in the hills above town, from old chimneys; yellow blazes of window light, comfortably and widely scattered over the hills, some hills larger than others—only then would the next cough, like something expelled, blat out. It was on one of these sleepless nights that Wallis realized Harry was dying.

  He tried to picture Dudley, the other Dudley, at the funeral, but could not. He knew that Harry ha
d family. Doubtless they pictured him a hero: gone for weeks at a time, on the great hunt, seeking riches. The wind blew hard over the motel. Dudley slept soundly. Wallis lay on his back with his hands behind his head and listened to Harry cough. He had a little more respect for Jack, but he still couldn’t understand why Jack would take such a job, would work for and with such a man. The wind blew harder. Limbs and branches began to land on the roof, and finally, the sounds of the coughs were carried away, and lost.

  Wallis dreamed about what it was like to be out there when the well was tested, and the proof—the oil itself—terrible, powerful, smelling good and very hot, came rushing up the hole: proving that you had been right.

  ***

  The town was too small. He couldn’t avoid them all the time; they ran into each other now and again. Dinner at dusk in the cafeteria with the buffet on Wednesday nights. Tables near each other: Harry speaking across two tables.

  “Why’d you leave Dudley, boy?” he asked, pausing with his mouth full. There were field peas and grits and all sorts of things in it. The waitress blanched and left that area of the room. Jack looked down at his plate and clenched his jaws. He wanted girls, oil, money, respect. He’d do anything for it: sell himself to Dudley, live with Harry. He played with his cornbread vaguely, scooted it around on his plate, and leaned slightly forward to hear Wallis better.

  “I learned how to find oil,” Wallis said. He could have been saying he had learned how to tie his shoelace. It didn’t hold any intrigue for him, and that puzzled Jack.

  Harry was mesmerized by oil, and thought all geologists were witches, shamans, fakes. He could only believe that which was in him.

  Jack looked at Wallis and could feel the thing that was different in Wallis, but didn’t know it had a name. There was confusion. Wallis seemed pretty much like a loser to Jack. Wallis would lose, he thought. And yet when he looked at Wallis the chain around Jack’s neck felt heavy: as heavy as if the entire satchel was hanging from it.