The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness

by Rick Bass

  ***

  She wanted to fly over her parents’ farm. She wanted to drop her bra into the woods, to see if she could find it. She didn’t wear underwear.

  “What will happen if it hits someone?” she asked.

  “It’ll kill them,” he said, truthfully. She was poised at the window, ready to open it, holding the bra in one hand like a thing soiled. She looked at him, surprised, and then laughed: the thought of it. And now the excitement: the risk. Quickly she shoved the window open—the fast suck of wind—and tossed the bra out. He watched her watch it go. Her back was still bare and had goose pimples. Her waist was narrow, with faint gold hairs at the base of her back. Totally engrossed, she watched the bra get smaller and smaller. He banked into a tight holding turn, like water spiraling around in a drain, so that she could keep watching. He had found love, his first time out, since the last time. It was no different from anything else in the world, he decided.

  Harry and Jack, with binoculars, on a hill deep in the woods, the highest point in the county, watched them circle.

  “He just threw something out,” Jack said.

  “It’s a marker,” Harry said. He began to cough: bending over. He straightened up. “I’ve seen ‘em do it a million times.” He turned to Jack in earnest: believing himself, almost, as he went along. “It’s for when the woods are too thick or dense to survey. He’s marking where the oil is. They do it in Texas all the time.”

  Jack watched them circle, and nodded. They would try to find the marker.

  ***

  The Fellowship Church of Vernon gave Wallis a lease for seventeen acres. Wallis wrote to a serviceman in Germany about another sixty-eight acres: a quiet, simple letter, explaining what he was about, what he wanted to do—to go in and drill where Dudley had missed. He got the lease for free. He began to go back and search all of Old Dudley’s plugged wells. About half of them seemed, to him, to be good. He took Sara with him often. They climbed to two miles in the plane. She wanted to laugh and cry both: there was so much to be seen. They climbed to three miles, until the engine faltered and their heads felt light and it was hard to breathe—Dudley on the floor, head under his paws, confused—and looked briefly, when there were no clouds, at the big roll of Appalachians: it was easy to see where the sea had ended. The area below them was, quite obviously, the old beach. Beaches. A hundred miles of it, curving and snaking all around, like a serpent, like a thing still, even that day, alive: it seemed to move as they watched it.

  Haze, and the sweep of earth curving away over the edge, its lovely roundness: they had left the earth. Three minutes, four minutes, for as long as they dared—five—the sky a rich heavy purple, a color never seen except at that altitude—and then the slow ride down, both of them suddenly aware of the frailty of the little plane; the lightness, and thinness, of the wings, light canvas wrapped around a hollow aluminum frame. The thinness of the thing that kept them aloft.

  ***

  “When he crashes, we go in and top his leases,” said Harry. The plane had disappeared from view, even to the plastic drug-store binoculars. “We pay the landowners, beforehand, to lease to us, exclusively, the first day his leases run out.”

  Jack nodded. It was what he was being taught. The leases were for three years. Harry and Jack tied up the land with five-year leases, but for some reason Wallis never asked for more than three years. Jack counted: both he and Wallis would be thirty-four in three years. He looked at Harry’s face, the open mouth—a wetness of saliva rimming his lips, perpetually hungry—as Harry looked heavenward through the binoculars, and was jealous that Wallis owned his own leases. The richest man in the state of Mississippi, the king of the poorest state in the union, was using them to chase a poor young pilot in love across the county, to learn what he was doing. It made Wallis seem like the holder of some kind of magic. It made Old Dudley’s terrible money and power seem less.

  ***

  Wallis started to work late into the nights at the courthouse. He got a key from the probate judge so that he could lock up when he was through: midnight, 1 A.M. A peanut butter sandwich for supper, around 7:00, the great ledgers open like biblical testaments, showing years and years of dizzying history; mortgages, leases, foreclosures, dry holes, and producers. He chewed his sandwich slowly, and read them, looked in all the right books. Dudley sat up on top of the counter and watched him, and waited patiently. Wallis was looking for all the leases on old wells that Old Dudley had plugged without testing. He was going to stop looking for oil, purely, and restrict himself to looking only for oil beneath places where Old Dudley had missed it. It would be like slapping his face with gloves: satisfying.

  It had been a new feeling for him the other day, an unexpected one, taking the twenty-seven-acre lease that Old Dudley had dropped several years ago. It was a surprise, and wonderful and new, much as flying and loving had been for Sara. He wanted to do it some more. In fact, it was all he wanted to do.

  Sara came up to the courthouse with him once, sat on the counter with Dudley and drank a beer, swinging her legs, and watched, but it was far too slow for her.

  When he could no longer keep his eyes open, he would call to his dog Dudley, who would leap down from the counter, and he would shut off the lights and lock up and drive back out to the pasture. Sometimes he would build a little fire and fix some coffee and go over what he had found. It was a lonely life. Dudley would sit and watch him and wait for whatever was going to happen next. Some nights there was the sound of coyotes: geese; owls, too. The air was fresh.

  ***

  They flew more and more: everywhere. They did it five hundred feet above the ground: they went lower. They skimmed along over the tops of trees: scattering birds, doves in roost. Sara got to be a fair pilot.

  “Can you find oil down on the coast?” she asked him.

  Wallis grinned, shook his head. “Nope,” he said. “Just up here.” His greatness was limited. He thought later how it was odd that he had never asked himself that question. There had never been a desire to look anywhere else. Why would a man want to go into a country he was not familiar with, knew nothing about?

  ***

  He showed her stalls: spins: figure eights. She was delighted, one day, when he rolled. He started leaving Dudley in the truck. More aerobatics, less mapping. Dudley drilled a well on one of Wallis’s prospects, one that Wallis had been able to edge into by buying two acres at the edge of it. They went out to visit the well: Sara, her hair long and clean, static against her sweater, flushed, elsewhere in her mind: having just flown.

  ***

  Old Dudley was out at the well, which was very unusual: Wallis had never seen him on a location, as long as he’d known him. There was word that he hadn’t been out to one in ten years. Harry and Jack knew nothing about geology, and were off eating or leasing. Wallis noticed Old Dudley watching him, at times, rather than the progress of the well itself. It was just a little pissant well, one whose outcome could mean nothing, one way or the other, to Old Dudley. He had his chauffeur and stretch limousine, both of which had been flown over from England. Red mud from the thick hills shrouded the limousine’s brilliant blackness.

  Wallis noticed Dudley still watching him, smiled, gave a little wave, then smiled wider. He was free.

  Dudley smiled, gave his little embarrassed half-nod—a tip of the head, almost like a bird beginning to feed—when he recognized Wallis, in jeans and boots—Dudley had on a black business suit and an overcoat. Wallis felt good that Old Dudley was acknowledging, and curious about, Wallis’s freedom. He could read Old Dudley, had learned him like a fascinating book: had studied the locations where he had drilled and knew why he did things—and he was confused, then, when Old Dudley turned his look to Sara and almost smiled, as if relieved at something. As if Old Dudley knew some sly and childish secret which he would not tell Wallis but would keep to himself, and be made happy by it. He turned and began walking, with his chauffeur, over to the well: roughnecks up on the derrick floor, looking down,
shirtless, muddy, ragged: a few of them wrestling with the drill pipe. A clear blue sky, a warming day.

  Wallis’s dog bolted: a blur at the edge of the cleared location was a rabbit.

  “Yo! Dudley! Get back here!” Wallis shouted. Old Dudley’s shoulders stooped, and he half-turned: an expression of genuine surprise, and then disappointment, to see that Wallis was running after a dog. He turned back around and continued walking. The well turned out to be oil: not a pissant well at all, but the largest discovery ever found in the basin.

  Old Dudley had the chauffeur stop by Wallis and Sara’s truck on the way out: the dog, muddy, bounding happily around in the back of the truck, barking at Old Dudley and at the strange long car. Old Dudley rolled his window down so that he could speak to Wallis.

  “Maybe we should plug this well?” Dudley looked different: more intense, more predatory—a way that Wallis had never seen him. Wallis leaned slightly closer, curious: never afraid, though the sense of power around Dudley was thick and heavy, malignant, like a bad odor.

  “I beg your pardon?” The well had metered out at twelve hundred barrels per day.

  Old Dudley chuckled. “I mean, that’s a lot of oil: we don’t want to glut the market. Perhaps we should wait until prices are more worth our while.” Dudley’s father had been a farmer, and poor all his life: poorer than Wallis. This time Old Dudley didn’t chuckle, and looked straight at Wallis, but Wallis was free. Wallis shrugged, held up his hands. It truly did not matter.

  “Why not?” Wallis said. “It’s your well.”

  Old Dudley’s face was leaning a little too far out: the anger, if it had been that, had to come back in. He looked tricked, betrayed.

  “I mean, for twenty or thirty years,” he said. But he was not good at threats, at cruelty. He was only good at making money.

  Wallis smiled, shrugged.

  Old Dudley watched him for a minute, unable to believe it was sincere, but then he did: the girl, the dog, the old truck. He smiled at Wallis, no longer angry, but thoughtful, nodded to Sara—the tip of an imaginary hat, it seemed—and even glanced at the dog, as he was being driven off, after the window had rolled back up. The well began selling oil that afternoon.

  ***

  On the drive home, Old Dudley thought about purity, and even intensity: how it once had been for him, when he was young and when it truly didn’t matter whether a well was shut in, rather than hooked on line, after being discovered: how finding it, rather than selling the oil, had been the only important thing. He was a businessman now, but had been a scientist, in school, and had been impressed with the knowledge that purity could never last, that nothing could ever last: that everything was changing, always. He had made his choice early and had not bothered to waste the energy—for it would have been wasted—trying to preserve the purity. He was sixty and had fifteen or twenty years of life left, and what he was interested in now, after so many years, what he was wishing, was that he had retained a bit of it after all, and its intensity, because he had all the success he needed.

  Though he had seen Wallis’s leasing activity, on the scouting reports, and was alarmed, slightly, at what it looked like he was doing. As if even his success—not physically, but emotionally—might be spirited from him.

  He thought that Wallis would fall back: that he would lose his purity, too.

  Dudley had hundreds of employees to think about and hundreds of business concerns, most of them larger and many of them more critical and pressing than what had over the years gotten to be a sideline, his oil activity, particularly in the Black Warrior Basin; but on the drive home, it was Wallis, and purity, and Wallis’s truck, dog, and girl that he thought about: thumb and forefinger holding his chin: tenement houses, ragged, scraggly winter cotton remains, and drooping telephone lines whizzing past. Tinted windows: conditioned air. An old black woman in an apron, coming out onto her porch and staring as his limousine passed. The chauffeur, so far up in front of him that an intercom was necessary to communicate. He looked away from the chauffeur, back out the window again, at the delta, and thought about Wallis. He knew that he couldn’t have picked a better girl to do it, but also Wallis was no fool, was finding oil, was on to something, and still had the dog and truck.

  ***

  Harry Reeves died on a Sunday afternoon, while driving the money truck: a grim picture it made, him collapsed over the wheel, his heart finally too squeezed by the excess of his flesh. The truck continued to thunder down the mountain along Little Hell’s Creek Road making for town—Jack grabbed the wheel, trying simultaneously to pull Harry’s deadness away from it—and when Jack put his foot in the vicinity of the brake, jabbing empty space, he got tangled up with Harry’s dead legs, and the polyester double-knit. The truck glanced the curb and rolled, spilling dogs, Harry, the spare tire, lug wrench, and the money satchel outside of town: Jack held on to the steering wheel and stayed in the truck.

  No one else was around. He got out, amongst the broken glass and hissing. One dog was dead, curled up in the wrong shape, and Harry was stretched out like a dead actor. The other dog was injured and was trying to reach around and lick its hind leg, or bite it—and like the last person on earth, with a raw and stinging patch on his forehead, Jack began walking in circles about the truck gathering up all of Dudley’s money: some of it caught in tufts of grass, tumbling across the road, some blown up against Harry, like seaweed against a whale’s carcass... Two thousand feet above the darkness of what was underground, a sealed, Paleozoic ocean, a silent beach, two hundred and fifty million years of silence, oil, and above it all he walked, picking up money. He wondered if he would get fired. It hadn’t been his fault: it had been Harry who had wrecked the truck. He wondered what he would do for a living if he lost his job. The richest man in Mississippi: he was working for the richest man in Mississippi.

  ***

  Wallis was having fried chicken at the Geohegans’ when he heard the news. The operator had called to tell Mrs. Geohegan: the mountain phone had a shrill clang that shook the thin walls of the house. He looked out the window to the large pasture and motionless cattle, the wooded creek, and out farther into blue haze and treetops. The chicken was good. The gravy was rich, and had pepper in it. He and Sara and Dudley had played tag out in the yard before lunch. He paused, digesting what he was hearing of the conversation between Mrs. Geohegan and the operator, tasting the food, and was relieved to feel sorrow, and a stillness, like being in the woods alone in the late afternoon. He had been worried by his quest for vengeance, and was hoping—knowing that Harry would die—that when he did, the news would not please him.

  It was colder than usual for March under the stars that night. Looking up from his place on his sleeping bag, and with his hands behind his head, he dreamed he was on the beach, the old beach, the one he knew better than anyone else and was born 250 million years too late to see, to know, to walk on—to skip across, barefooted, splashing in the shallows. Warm tidal channels, back dunes, sea oats... He thought about what he would do if he did not look for oil. He tried faithfully to think of Sara’s kisses: of her eyes looking up at him when he talked about oil... the shine in them was similar to the shine of her hair. It bothered him that he could not fall in love with her. Perhaps if he could find one more oil well, a big one, the biggest ever... there had to be release in it, eventually.

  He was trapped into succeeding, he thought. Maybe if he drilled a dry hole he could be normal.

  ***

  He went to the funeral. Jack’s dog was bandaged, looking silly, sitting in the cab of a new blue truck: watching the funeral with a bandage around its waist and head. Wallis went over to the rolled-down window and stuck his head in, let the dog lick it. Jack came over and asked if Wallis could do him a favor: if he could take care of the dog...

  “Yes,” said Wallis, without looking up. He watched the dog lick his hand. The dog was desperate to be loved. The dog was desperate to love. He thought about Old Dudley coming out to test that well. He thought about
a prospect in the east portion of the county. The sun and windiness of spring was making him feel light and drawn away from where he was standing. It seemed that every day he could see the old beach more and more clearly: where the dunes were, which would hold oil and which wouldn’t, long after they had been buried and forgotten: what the waves had looked like, what the view down the beach had been—the long, straight stretches, and too, the bends, and deep parts offshore... He was the only inhabitant in that world, and it was a beach before men, and he liked it: he felt... loved. As if the beach had chosen him, for its loneliness. How could he drill a dry hole, when he knew the old empty beach so well?

  He flew. The trees and creeks, cemeteries and hills that cloaked those ancient buried beaches didn’t bother him. He was seeing his old land. He now only made weak, stabbing attempts at loving Sara. She flew with him: they loved, and afterward, he was looking out the window again; sometimes, and without guilt, he would look out even as it was going on, the love. She wanted to go to Atlanta one weekend, having never been, and he took her. It didn’t matter. He found three more wells: small, small interests, but they belonged to him.

  She wanted to go to New Orleans, and they stayed in a room high up over the city, a room that smelled of rich times and with mirrors on the ceiling above the bed. He felt detached, far from his shore. At night they walked down to the river, where it went into the sea. A cool breeze lifted off it and came at them. This was his old ocean, cowardly, on the retreat now: some three hundred miles south of where it had once been, in its greatness, inland, when it was brave: the ocean’s great advance northward into a place and country it had never been before, and might never return to. He looked out at the river, going into the Gulf, and tried to feel close to it, knowing it was the same... but it wasn’t. It didn’t have that bravery his had had, so long ago. She looked at him questioningly, and took his arm, and they went to eat. She was starting to fall in love with him.