Where the Sea Used to Be

by Rick Bass

  “You’re the geologist,” she said, and studied his face as one might examine the skull of some extinct species, vaguely hominoid—marveling and wondering at what shared similarities there might be, despite the presence of some immense gulf of time, and evolution.

  “I’m learning,” he said. “They sent me up here to find oil. They told me you might not be too happy about it.”

  She smiled. “What else did they tell you?”

  Wallis blushed. He couldn’t tell if she was beautiful or not. He thought she was, but her force, her strength, was so overriding that that was the main impression he got, looking at her. Her beauty—if it could be called that—was not so noticeable, not any singular thing. If he watched her eyes, he would not be able to pay attention to the shape of her mouth. Her lips were pale from the cold. Her eyebrows and eyelashes, already sand-colored, were also rhimed with frost. She had a ski cap on.

  The valley below gleamed in the sunlight—the velvet uncut forest cupped within it. A few gray threads of smoke rose from the chimneys of a handful of cabins that he could not see. A river cut through the middle of the small valley, sometimes straight and other times winding, and he read it quickly, like an x-ray technician, imagining already the fault structuring that had given birth and shape to such a river.

  The valley was ringed by high white mountains, jagged, stony. The night before, the dim shape of the valley had looked like a sump, a depression—a trap one could stagger into, with no way out—but in the morning, in that bright cold sunlight, it looked like a haven.

  “They didn’t tell me much else,” he said, and she studied him less like a specimen now—less interested in cranial content—and more like a living human; as if interested in his specific secrets.

  “Uh huh,” she said. “I’ll bet they didn’t.” Another laugh—a sharp breath of ice—and now he studied her teeth, square and white, as if she ate nothing but snow.

  When they stood, he saw that she was leaner than he had first thought—wide-boned, but loose-fleshed—and she saw that he was leaner, too. She had imagined—in the little she had thought of it beforehand—that he would be shaped like Matthew: as if that was how the earth sculpted geologists—wide, short, and muscular; as if even the body desired to move boulder and earth.

  Wallis, she saw, wasn’t much of anything. Plain old brown hair, with a glint or two of red in it. She wondered if each geologist Dudley sent, after Matthew, would be more and more diminished, like waves thinning as they slide into shore.

  “You’ll be here until the spring?” she said.

  They both knew it would be the summer at least, and probably into the fall: that the snows would not melt, revealing the surface rocks for him to map, until April or May. Wallis wasn’t sure why Old Dudley had sent him into the valley so early, unless it had something to do with the way Dudley hunted his falcons and hawks: the “waiting on” period being nearly as dramatic as the dive itself: the hawk hovering so high as to be sometimes out of sight—suspended, like desire drawn taut, waiting for the quarry to flush—waiting forever, it might seem. Waiting to see if there even was a quarry.

  “Climb on my back,” she said. “You can come get the jeep in the spring.”

  “They won’t plow the road until then?”

  Mel shrugged. “Maybe. Sometimes we try to keep it open, so a supply truck can make it in. But a lot of years we can’t. It may open up one more time, around Christmas. People like to leave a car or truck up here so they can get out, if they have to. You can just leave your keys in it. Come on,” she said.

  “I’ll walk,” Wallis said. “How far is it?”

  “Almost ten miles,” Mel said. “You wouldn’t get there today. Come on.”

  They went fast, down the iced-over tracks of her ascent, and faster yet with his added weight. It was far too quick for Wallis—a hurdling, a falling—and he held on for dear life. He was amazed by her strength. She skied in a tucked crouch, her knees bent. Her back was broad, and he stayed in close against it, his head turned to one side, watching the scenery flash past. Her hair blew back in his face and swirled in his eyes. He could feel the strength of each muscle in her flexing, working with each curve in the road. It was not like riding a horse. It was not like sex. There was nothing to compare it to that he knew of. It was like being locked leg-in-leg and arm-in-arm with someone falling from the sky.

  When she made her turns—sinking even lower into a crouch to do so—roostertails of sunlit ice shavings sprayed them both. The wind from their speed was cold. They dropped lower down the mountain, descending, corkscrewing, as if into its interior. He could feel the pleasure coming straight through her—could feel it like heat conducted, as if it were his.

  They raced lower into the valley. The trees were immense, and the sunlight fell upon them in shafts. A rock wall appeared on their right. Snow-covered, it followed the road in a crooked, wandering weave, and seemed to Wallis to make the scenery not more bucolic, but wilder, as if they were going back in time, back to some time before true fences. The wall reminded him of the crude territorial boundaries of some feudal warlord. It was waist-high and constructed almost as if without seams, and he watched it, nearly hypnotized, instead of watching the woods. He tried to imagine such a seam of rock wall running underground, but couldn’t; the piston risings and fallings, the fracturings and grindings would in no way allow such a thing to travel that far uninterrupted, nor so gracefully.

  They skied across a wooden bridge. Dark water rushed beneath them, with steam rising where it passed into the sun. Snow and ice lacework fringed its edges, closing in on the stream from both sides.

  The rock wall passed through the stream—enormous rocks, now, to withstand ice floes and jams—and behind the wall, upstream, the water had backed into a pond of black water ringed by white bare-limbed aspen trees. The dark water behind the wall had not frozen yet, but something about the appearance of it made Wallis think that it was about to any day, any moment.

  He caught a glimpse of movement in the pond as they thundered across the bridge. Their sudden appearance had caused some great dark creature at the back of the pond to lift its head. It was a moose, chocolate-brown, with a mantle of snow on his head and wide antlers, his back freighted with snow. With water dripping from his muzzle, he watched the skiers, and Wallis wanted to stop and watch him. Standing knee-deep, serene amidst all that snow around him, the moose seemed somehow wise—his head huge as an anchor. But then they were past him, and there was only more forest, and rock wall, and they raced on, past more and more of it, as if it would never end.

  Around one corner, Mel tipped too far forward and hit a small bump—her eyes blurry with icicle tears from her speed—and they became airborne. There was an alarming moment when Wallis could feel her strength leave her, as she lost contact with the ground—it was as if he had his arms and legs wrapped around just any old person, rather than someone of such strength—and they cartwheeled wildly when they landed; and when they finally skidded to a stop, it seemed to both of them as if he had pursued and caught her, had tackled her, like some predator pulling down its prey. But she was the first one up, dusting herself off and then helping him up. No injuries. The buffering, the forgiveness, of snow.

  He climbed up on her back again, and they skied on. The snow crusted their faces like masks from where they had fallen, and caked their clothes: and doubled up as they were, humpbacked, they looked like some strange creature born from out of the snow.

  The road pitched and dropped. Wallis could see the river now through the trees, and was surprised at the size of it, for such a small valley. Again, he tried to imagine what story lay beneath it—whether the strike of the formations, the outcrops, was canted left or right—a reverse, normal, thrust, or slip-fault. He scanned the snowy mountains for clues, but it was impossible to say. He wondered again why Dudley had sent him up here in the winter, and what he would do during the long months to keep his skills sharp, when instead he still could have been down on the Gulf Coa
st finding oil. Wallis wondered if it were a kind of punishment for his not finding enough oil. He thought he had been doing a pretty good job: not finding as much as Matthew, but finding a lot; and he was still learning. Matthew had peaked. Matthew was definitely finished with learning.

  Mel was skating now. They came around a corner and into town, still following the stone wall. Wallis saw buildings that he had not been able to see from the summit: a store on one side of the street and a bar on the other. A couple of dusty-windowed outbuildings, already snowed in for winter.

  There were horses, cars, and trucks parked on both sides of the street. Wallis glanced back and saw that two coyotes were running along behind them, but the coyotes turned back when they reached the edge of town and skittered into the woods.

  There were people standing out in the street in the sunlight, and there were long food-covered tables set out. Men, women, children, and dogs surrounded the tables. Steam rose from a turkey carcass as a huge man with a big black beard carved it. The children played bareheaded, threw snowballs, chased each other in circles. People stood in small groups, drinking hot coffee and cider, with steam rising from their cups.

  Mel skated up to the bar’s wood-rail porch and unloaded Wallis like a sack of mail—as if he were the one who was tired.

  A few faces turned to look at Wallis, briefly, but most stayed focused on the long tables of food. There was a roast pig, glaze-glistening with the apple still in his mouth, legs outstretched as if in flight. There was a little fire burning off to one side, and children roasted marshmallows on it. Wallis caught the scent of pumpkin pie. Mel and Wallis brushed the snow from their clothes and went into the bar.

  A roar came from the men and women gathered around the table as a gust of icy wind blew a funnel of loose snow down the lengths of the tables and swirled cyclone snow-devils off the roofs of the buildings. For a moment, all visibility faded—there was nothing but blowing snow, drifts and drifts of it—but then the wind paused, and the world filled with sunlight again, and the men and women and children resumed filling their plates.

  They brushed the windblown snow from the turkey carcass and brushed it from the pig’s head. The snow steamed from where it had landed on his hot back. They cut into him with silver knives. Steam rose from the ribs. Those gathered around the pig made small gasping and groaning sounds of pleasure as they tasted the meal, and their cries of approval brought others. More gusts of ground snow blew back in, obscuring their dark shapes: but Wallis could hear them, down there by the pig, as they fell upon the feast with what seemed like neither mercy nor thanks, only hunger.

  DANNY WAS THE OWNER OF THE BAR—THE RED DOG. IN one corner, a huge wood stove cast a ferocious heat. Dogs napped next to it, their fur steaming, and there were various articles of clothing hung on racks next to it to dry, and boots and more clothes scattered on the floor, also steaming, as if the bodies they housed had disappeared or been consumed from within. The heads of moose, wolf, coyote, lynx, bobcat, marten, fisher, elk, deer, caribou, bighorn, mountain goat, black bear, grizzly, whitetail, mule deer, mountain lion, badger, and wolverine stared down from the walls in such an assemblage of fang and horn that in viewing them a person felt neither awe nor a sense of majesty, but instead only a relief that the animals could do no harm, would forever be poised at the edge of no longer being able to do harm. And from that relief—the feeling that one was safe, and alive—came a feeling of security, if not comfort.

  Some of the dusty, patchy heads of the animals looked as if they had hung up there, straining to bite, for perhaps a hundred years. And the heads of the prey, especially the deer and elk, looked different to Wallis—like different species or subspecies brought back from some distant continent—a red deer, rather than an elk—so that he wondered if that short stretch of time, a hundred years, had been able to produce some kind of speciation—isolating some traits in one population while gathering certain others, so that, while no one had been noticing it—death by death, and life by life—various new species, or subspecies, had been crafted, while old ones had fallen away.

  The thought of it made Wallis dizzy, as might a blasphemy to the ears of the devout. Wallis was so used to dealing in chunks of a hundred million years at a time—the birth and then total erasure (grain by grain) of entire mountain ranges—that the notion that anything of significance could occur in only a hundred years seemed to threaten who he was; or rather, who he had become.

  There were pictures of Matthew all over the walls too—and pictures of Mel, and Old Dudley, and Danny—and Wallis noticed that all of the pictures were old—the youngest of them from twenty years ago, it seemed.

  Was it his imagination, or were the smiles, the laughter, from those times more boisterous, more complete? He shook the thought away. These were the kind of thoughts that would impede his ability to dive into the boulder fields—to track the old paths of mountains as they moved across the landscape of the past like dunes of sand.

  Danny was bringing them drinks, and pouring one for himself. He kept shaking Wallis’s hand and patting him on the shoulder, touching him, saying how glad he was to have him in the valley, and asking about Matthew and Old Dudley. The feeling Wallis got from Danny’s enthusiasm was that Old Dudley and Matthew could do no harm, nor Mel either—and, by extension, neither could Wallis, now that he was among them. But Wallis also had the feeling—irrational, unprovable—that it was as if he, Wallis, had become trapped—coming in over the pass like that, just as the valley was being sealed in by winter’s snow—and that Danny’s pleasure was partly that of the trapper who, upon approaching his set, finds that he has been successful.

  “How’s Matthew doing? Is he finding lots of oil? Are he and Dudley getting along? When are they coming back?” Danny was in his early fifties, flat-bellied, childlike. “Tell me about yourself,” he said. His eyes were pale blue, a shade that Wallis couldn’t remember having ever seen in a human before—almost like a Siberian husky’s, he thought—and Wallis wondered if, as with the heads of some of those animals, the color of Danny’s eyes was a color left over from the century before: like someone’s grandfather’s eyes, or even further back than that.

  “You’ll be staying out at Matthew’s cabin?” Danny asked, with a glance at Mel. He gestured to the bar. “You’re welcome to stay here, if you’d rather—I’ve got an extra room in the back.” Mel smiled, shook her head, and said, “Relax, Danny, he’s not going to ravage me; I’m still Matthew’s girl.” Danny looked relieved, even hopeful, but said, “That’s not what I meant—I just meant, if he needed a place to work and concentrate, you know, be alone . . .”

  Mel smiled again. “I think it’ll be quieter for him out in the woods. Anyway, I won’t ever be home, except at night, when I get in from tracking. It’ll be fine,” she said. She laughed. “He’s not going to find anything, anyway. No offense,” she said, speaking to Wallis now, “but you’re not.”

  Wallis shrugged. “I didn’t come up here to fail.”

  Mel shook her head. “He sent you up here to train you and to play you against Matthew. The whole time you’re up here, looking for oil in places where Matthew couldn’t find it, Matthew will be worrying about that, and working harder, down in Texas.” There was less cheer in her voice now: more matter-of-fact. “He’s doing this to see what you’ve got—to see if maybe you can figure out something new about this valley—but mostly to lash Matthew to work even harder. To try to melt him down. My father has a real problem tolerating strength, beauty, or grace.”

  “Well,” said Wallis, “I guess I’ve seen a little of that about him. But he can find oil,” he said. “And that’s what I’m here for. I don’t know about any of that other stuff.”

  Danny interrupted. “Mel doesn’t want there to be any oil or gas here,” he said. “Me, I guess I’d kind of like to see it—just a little bit of it. I don’t see how a little would hurt anything. It wouldn’t be much different from cutting a load or two of firewood, or shooting a deer, or planting a garde
n.”

  Mel walked away from him, went over to one of the bar’s two small windows. Wallis wondered if she ran from all arguments. The dim light was blue on the side of her face, making it look as if she were submerged.

  A roar went up from the crowd outside, and Wallis and Danny went over to the other window. It had gotten darker as they had talked.

  They saw that a deer, a whitetail buck, was bounding down the center of the street, its head a crown of antlers. The deer kicked up tufts of snow as it ran, running right through the middle of the crowd but touching no one.

  People were diving out of the way, ducking under the dinner tables and rolling to the side. One man tried to tackle the deer and was bounced backward several yards. Mel sucked in her breath. The heavy man with the big black beard, who was carving on the turkey again, hurled his butcher knife at the deer, end over end, as it ran past; he missed, but almost got a woman standing on the other side of the street.

  Now Danny was running to the cash register, where he pulled out a pistol, and he ran out onto the porch and fired twice as the deer ran past, and the deer leapt and humped up its back and then skidded to a stop, still as a rock, and Wallis was struck by how quickly the snow was already piling up on him, from the very beginning: big flakes, now, already trying to bury him.

  Blood seeped from the deer’s nostrils and mouth. He lifted his head once, grunted, then died—died twice, it seemed.

  The snow was so silent. The two shots seemed never to have happened. Already it was as if the deer had befallen some accident—a visiting king or emissary, now, struck down in the town, his antlers rising high above him, like branches trying to catch the snow. The tips of them were stained red from where he had been fighting another deer. He was in rut and his neck was swollen with muscle, and they could smell his sex and musk, and now his blood. Danny had hit him in the jaw with the first shot and the shoulder with the second.