by Rick Bass
They climbed out from beneath their hides and stood among the horses and watched the beauty of it. At that temperature, the snow was more like the color of mercury. It was so cold that the snow up top had not crusted but was as loose as sand; they stood knee-deep in it, picked it up with their gloved hands and tossed it into the sky toward the comet, and followed its glittering columns back to earth.
The comet’s tail was clearly visible—it looked out of place amongst the star-multitude, blurry and restless, like a flashlight shining through a patch of fog—and it seemed that they could even see the slow fizz and sputter of sparks from its tail.
“Where did Dudley drill?” a woman asked Mel, and Mel looked around but could not place the exact spot. It made her uneasy knowing there was a hole in the ground somewhere just beneath her, only eight inches in diameter but almost twenty thousand feet deep. To seal it, they had pumped in a few sacks of cement, then welded a steel plate over the top, nothing more.
“Why did he drill on the top of a mountain?” someone asked.
“Because he’s a numbnuts, is why,” answered Colter.
“Colter!” Amy cried.
“Excuse me,” he said, “but it’s true.”
“Apologize,” said Amy.
“I’m sorry.”
They moved in closer to the horses, pressing against them, shivering. There were no lights down in the valley, and the cold possessed such a weight that it seemed it might crack them all—as if they were each crystalline things of no substance or strength. It was frightening, being up high like that—up close to the comet.
“I can still smell the oil,” Colter said. Mel knew what he meant; fifteen years later, it still lingered, faintly, emanating from the bark of the trees. Not any oil Dudley had discovered, but the rankness of diesel from the engines that had been running the search. That oil must be soaked into the ground all around them, too, and Mel wondered if Colter could be smelling it beneath the snow.
It was already time to leave; they could bear the cold no longer. “Look once more,” the parents told their children. “Are you sure you see it?”
They all did; the children had seen it immediately, had easily picked it out from amidst all the other seeming star-sameness. Some of them even imagined they could see a grinning face and eyes on the head of the comet.
Mel marveled at how clearly the children could see it, and at how excited they were by it. She had thought they would consider it to be small and insignificant—a little blurrier than a true star, and not much larger—tiny against the whole sky—but they were carrying on as if it were one of the most exciting things they’d ever seen—like junior astronomers, every one of them. She felt deeper the suspicion that she was becoming jaded to life—that even out here, in the blood-and-guts middle of it, her crust was hardening. She felt wonder, and peace, even awe—but she could not summon the utter, reckless joy of the children.
Helen had come with them—piled beneath such a burden of coats and hides that she could barely stand—and she had begun to hack and cough; at one point she leaned over and ejected a launch of sputum that, when it landed against the snow, looked suspiciously dark, like blood.
They bundled back into their sleighs and settled in amongst one another for warmth. Though the rocks still retained some of their warmth, they could not feel any of it, and there never could be as many hides as they needed to stay warm. There was hay in the bottom of the sleighs for them to shove their feet into, and inside the sleighs they lit lanterns and took turns passing the hissing lanterns around, holding them up to their bare faces to warm frozen cheeks—each face illuminated orange gold for a moment, with shrouds of frost-breath puffing from colorless lips—and then the chattering of someone else’s teeth would bear request for the lantern to be passed on. The horses made good time, heading down the mountain, plowing through their previous trail, so that there was only the sound of the sleigh skimming across the snow, and the jingle of the horses’ harness bells, and the freezing trees exploding around them like cannons, while above, the silent comet was moving fast.
The snows returned two days later. The wolves were courting now—Mel had found blood in the urine of the alpha female, and had found the fresh tracks showing where the alpha male and alpha female had paired off—and she had known she was close to them, within hours. She’d looked into the curtain of swirling snow and had felt a deep loneliness, an exclusion that was almost bitter in its depth, as if the world were passing her by: a self-pitying bleakness made all the more bitter by the fact that she knew the passing-by to be false, but still, the emotion was in her, as she stared in the direction the wolves had gone . . .
By the time the snows stopped, a week later, the comet was gone, and for several days afterward, many people felt similarly passed by—all for different reasons specific to each of their lives, but all in the same manner—confused, abandoned, bereft—as if some potential had been unfulfilled.
“I don’t remember seeing any when I was a kid,” Artie said. “But now it seems like they’re coming fast and furious—like there’s one almost every year.”
“Well, they say this is the last one for a long while,” Danny said.
“What’s the Bible got to say about all this, Amy?” Artie joked.
Amy, who was knitting, made a little humming sound, shook her head, then said, “Well, it’s not good,” and they all laughed.
Colter was practicing with his father’s bow. He had set up a stuffed deer—burlap bags stitched and filled with hay—in front of the saloon, and had fastened a set of antlers to the dummy; while the adults visited, he would be out practicing, whether in the afternoon or by moonlight. He had an aptitude for it from the beginning, taking to it as naturally as some children do to a violin or fiddle, and within weeks, his aim was as close to perfect as could be imagined; he had riddled one deer’s heart and had had to get Amy to sew him a new one.
He would shoot for hours, coming in only to warm his hands before going back out. He soon tired of hitting a motionless target and took an interest in shooting at moving ones. He would toss things into the air—hats, hubcaps, anything—and shoot at those. He usually missed, and when anyone stepped out of the bar there would often be the risk of arrows whizzing past like bullets—he had no concept of there being a background behind anything he shot at: he saw only the object of his intent—but at this too, his aim improved so quickly that it was clearly not an acquired talent, but instead one of those rarest ones, a thing that had been living within him nearly fully formed since birth, and which only had to be revealed, not created.
“What would happen if he came back to the valley to stay?” Wallis asked Mel one evening. “Would things between you two go back to how they were? Would you try to get back to that point?” Wallis had finished his new draft of the maps, another blind vision of how he believed things to be.
Mel considered pretending not to know what he was talking about. “You mean, what would happen to you and me?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Wallis.
“He’s not coming back,” Mel said.
“But what if he did?”
“I would be happy to see him,” Mel said, carefully, though unsure, for the first time, if she meant it.
It went beyond fatigue. There was the awful feeling, the one worse than burnout, that she had been on the wrong path all along and was either going to have to find a new one, or just lie down and quit.
She looked at the man across the table from her. With all his wood splitting and water hauling, he was starting to fill out wider, so that more than ever he resembled Matthew. He wasn’t, of course—he was as mild and cautious as Matthew was impulsive and erratic—and Mel felt disloyal and confused—not to Matthew, but to herself—for even tolerating, much less liking and being attracted to, such a force, if one could call Wallis a force.
It was like resting. She liked resting with him. She needed rest. But it didn’t seem fair to Wallis. If she rested with him, what would happen then, aft
er she had gotten enough and decided to get up and start moving again? It would be as unfair to Wallis, she thought, as what Matthew was doing—had done—to her.
She tried to explain it to Wallis.
“So you have thought about us, a little,” he said finally.
“A little,” Mel said. “More than you, probably.” She pushed her chair back from the table. “I think ahead to spring sometimes—late April, May, June. I imagine lying naked in a field of daffodils, with or without you. I think about black dirt. Pm going to take time to have a garden this year, which is a thing I’ve never done before. I’m slowing down. Yes, I’ve been thinking about it,” Mel said. “Probably too much.”
“That’s a nice image,” Wallis said.
“What?”
He turned his coffee cup in his hands. “The daffodils.”
“You know Matthew comes back by himself in March, don’t you?”
“No,” Wallis said, “I didn’t know that.” He studied the fire. “I remember last year he got real blue, said he was depressed and was going to go to a beach somewhere. Said he needed some sunlight.”
“Beach, hell,” Mel said, “unless he means the one twenty thousand feet below. He comes up here and passes out. Helen and I have to tend to him for a week or two. We get him just recovered enough to go back to Old Dudley for one more year, and then one more after that one, and then one more . . . Anyway,” she said, “you’ll just go back to him too. I don’t know why we’re even talking about this.”
Wallis shook his head. “It’s different for me,” he said. “I don’t feel that allegiance to Dudley. I don’t even like him.”
Mel got up and began clearing the dishes, exasperated—remembering twenty years ago, when she had first found, and in that same year, first begun losing Matthew.
“That’s how it starts out,” she said. “You’re too close in—you can’t see it. But you’ll have to have a thing only he can give you. You’ll need him.”
“I could quit,” Wallis said. “I could quit any day—could just draw the maps. I wouldn’t have to drill the wells.”
“Bullshit,” said Mel.
She left the dishes in the sink to wash later, or for Wallis to get, and went over to her desk and unrolled her own map. It was so different from his, in that it would never be finished—would never be right or wrong, but ongoing—and she wondered if part of her irritation with him that evening was simple jealousy.
They slept that night like strangers in a boarding house. Wallis wanted to open the windows to let all the tension out. He’d pushed too soon, he thought: wanting to define things.
He tried to remember his office in Houston, the smell and feel of it. The overhead lamp, the drafting table: electric eraser, pencil sharpener, file cabinets, desk, drafting stool. The view of the bayou below, twenty floors down. The way he had been able to stand by the plate glass window on a windy day and feel the building swaying—a terrible, exhilarating sensation of vertigo. Sometimes he would lean against the window to feel it tremble from the winds outside: a quarter-inch of glass separating him from all that was below. Once Old Dudley had come into his office and had seen him standing at the window like that, arms outstretched, and had smiled, not knowing whether to be pleased or worried, but all he’d said was, “Don’t jump.”
Mel dreamed that night of silt and mud—of brown swamps, heavy sediment moving in suspension. Water the color of chocolate milk baking sluggish in the sun—water moving so slowly that no direction of current could be discerned. Water acting lost, searching for a way out—a passage to continue toward the place it had long ago set out after, and still desired.
She tangled in her elk hides and perspired until her whole upper body was drenched with sweat, but still she did not awaken, only tossed and moaned; and in the next room, Wallis heard her, was kept awake by her, felt the air in the little cabin filling with her anguish—a thing like craziness—until finally he rose and threw open the window in his room.
He stood at the window and breathed deeply the scent of fir and pine, listened to the stillness. He stood there for a long time, until his own heart calmed, and he felt the bad air in the cabin flowing out the open window and being dispersed and broken apart by the forest and the beauty of silence. His heart calmed still further, and the sounds of Mel’s moans quieted, then stopped, and after that, the cabin felt more like how it had earlier been. He imagined a single cut yellow flower.
The snow came down through the days and nights as if spilling uncontrolled from some wound in the sky, and further into the winter, various old buildings began collapsing beneath the weight of it. The snows were far beyond anything known or measured in the few decades that whites had lived in the valley, and every night people went to bed with the snow still falling, sometimes as much as an inch or two an hour, and wondered if their cabin would be the next to go. No residences had been crushed yet—just barns and outbuildings—but the snows kept coming, stacking and then compressing to become slabs of blue ice, dense as stone.
There was good work for Colter, and a few others, in the shoveling of roofs—though by February it had come to seem like a ceaseless work, with the shovelers spending more time on the roofs than on the ground, so that it was as if they were occupying some slightly elevated level beyond the town’s strata. If people couldn’t afford to pay, they bartered—meat, canned vegetables, antlers, hides, pelts, firewood—or traded services. It didn’t really matter, in the end, who was holding the money at the end of the day; the same two or three hundred dollars would keep making the rounds, passing from hand to hand and becoming as thin and tattered as old brown leaves, until they were finally indistinguishable, worthless . . . The snow kept coming down, faster than anyone’s ability to remove it, until most gave up and went inside, resigned to wait for spring, dependent now only upon mercy.
It looked increasingly as if the town had been bombed; so many buildings were crushed flat with nothing remaining but an erratic jumble of logs poking up out of the snow.
Wallis helped shovel, and in the evenings he would lie on his back in front of the fire and groan like a dog. He was becoming wider and even more muscular from all the labor, but the birthing pains of it were intense. He would roll over on his stomach and let Mel knead his back with her elbows and knees, trying to buffer the buildup of acid, and to keep the muscles from cramping and torquing, tugging at him in different places and intensities in such a way as to corkscrew him prematurely into some gnarled, bent-over crippled old thing. He imagined a hide stretched out on a rack to dry evenly. The heat from the fire, and the points of her elbows, quelled the rebellion in his muscles.
He would bathe, then crawl off to bed and sleep for twelve, sometimes fourteen hours. More than anything he wanted one day off. Just one day.
Mel made sure he kept eating, though he was too tired to have much of an appetite. She fed him the four basics: moose, deer, elk, grouse. He kept growing, and in his sleep, as his muscles swelled, it seemed that he would grow too large to fit in the cabin. Matthew’s clothes fit Wallis perfectly now. And though he knew it was a dangerous and narrow path—slipping so easily into the groove cut by another—he would sometimes smell the old rock dust on Matthew’s coats and shirts, from where Matthew had been working on the rock wall—wearing long sleeves and overalls even in summer to keep from tearing up his arms on the rough edges—and Wallis would feel the urge to use his new muscles, the great power and leverage of them. He would find himself craving to work on the wall himself—to haul and position and stack the dense blocks in their simple but unifying pattern—two on one, one on two. He found himself anxious for spring, so that maybe he could add to the rock wall.
His map was finished, or so he thought; he kept it rolled up, waiting for the master, and continued to read the master’s notebooks.
“When was the last time you saw the wolves?” he asked Mel one night as they lay by the fire.
She had to look in her journal. She thumbed through it for a long time. “Two y
ears ago last June,” she said.
“What would you do if you didn’t follow the wolves?” he asked.
“I don’t follow them,” she said. “I move away from them.”
“What would you do?” he asked.
“What would you do, if you didn’t map?”
“I can’t imagine a damn thing,” Wallis said. “I’d be lost.”
“So he’s got you,” Mel said. “You’re trapped.”
“Except that I don’t mind it.”
“I snowshoed a long way today,” Mel said. “Will you work on my back?”
He was surprised at the strength of it. It felt stronger than his. He tried to separate the muscles with his hands, with his thumbs, but couldn’t. He leaned in with his elbows, but could find no yield.
“Try and relax,” he said.
“I am relaxed,” Mel said, then added, “That’s okay. It feels good. You’re warm. Just lie there, please.”
He stretched out over her back, her skin warmed by the fire. He wondered if he smelled to her like Matthew, in Matthew’s clothes, or like himself: or what, if any, difference there was.
After the fire burned out, and she was asleep, Wallis lifted himself from her back and lay down next to her and pulled a hide over them. She woke up once in the night and smiled at him, then went back to sleep.