Where the Sea Used to Be (65 page)

As the villagers disappeared like wolves into the smoke, Mel thought how even if one day the wolves were gone from the valley there would still for some short time afterward be the echo or shape of a thing like wolves.

 

School started the next day. Mel was sleepless that night, in a good way, thinking ahead to the future: to her child, to the hunt in the coming weeks, to the next day's lesson plan. She knew her first impulse would be to try to tell the students everything in a day, all at once, and that she might have to work against her instincts, and instead move carefully, steadily.

She lay there awake while Wallis slept. She felt more than ever that she was two or three steps out in front of herself, for the first time in a long time, and it was not a bad feeling.

She arose near what she believed was dawn and fixed a cup of tea, being careful not to awaken Wallis. She sat there for an hour: not reading, not thinking ahead, not looking back: not doing or thinking anything. Then she dressed and went to school, walking slowly. When she got to town and went into the schoolhouse, where there was a battery-clock that worked, she saw that it was 3:00
A.M.,
and she laughed, fixed a fire to begin warming the room up, then lay down on the floor and napped for another couple of hours, until the world began to glow dully with daylight, and she was awakened by the laughs of children.

 

Old Dudley and Matthew kept waiting for the rig crew to return. Dudley stayed at Amy's the first couple of nights, but said that the baby's cries kept him awake at night, and so he moved over to the mercantile, where Matthew was staying.

The two men spent large amounts of time skulking around the rig, impatient to begin again; and though the well had only drilled down through about four thousand feet of glacial dust and cobble, the two men amused themselves by wading out into the mud pit and straining out and examining the ground-up drill cuttings from that insignificant passage: studying the powdery remains intently, as if trying to fool themselves into believing that some great treasure lay right beneath their feet, rather than so many miles down.

They prowled and paced, waiting. They were deeper into the forest, closer to the fires, and sometimes they would look up from their examinations and watch a flame leap from treetop to treetop; and in the evenings, as dusk settled onto the layers of smoke below, they would watch the floating traces of sparks overhead, sparks following currents of heat as if riding along the borders of an invisible river of fire, lighting the banks of the river above them like blinking lanterns set along that shore.

Matthew rowed Dudley back and forth across the river several times each day to check on the well—as if the old man believed that the well might have resumed drilling on its own, according to his passion.

In the afternoons, Dudley often napped, and Matthew had time on his hands. He would usually spend those afternoons hanging around beneath Helen's tree, like an old hound. On more than one occasion he climbed up into the top of the cottonwood and opened the hatch of the great thunderbird and peered in at her, and was each time afterward sorry that he had, though still, he could not keep from wanting one last look.

Other afternoons he would rise from the tall grass beneath the cottonwood, would rouse himself from his funk, and would set off down the river to search for fish, to help replenish Mel's empty smokehouse.

Some afternoons he would catch some, and would gut them and carry them on a stringer thrown over his shoulder, would take them back to the school, where, if school were still in session, he would peer in at Mel through the window, as if a drunkard, and would gesture to the fish he had caught for her.

He would remember his own days in the little schoolroom, not so long ago, but seeming as if centuries past. Mel ignored him.

 

The woods kept burning, though the main teeth of the fire had passed through the valley, and now there were only the steady, random creepings of fire, like a dog clacking and grinding on the same bone for days on end. Old Dudley had been trying, with the satellite phone, to find a new rig crew—calling contractors in Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, Wyoming, even Russia and China—but none were available immediately, so that finally he stopped calling, and announced one evening at the bar—baby Mary on his knee, as he warmed to her slowly—that he was going to drill the well himself, he and Matthew, and that they were going to start the next day. “We'll need a third hand,” Dudley said, casting around the room for Wallis, and whether Wallis was recruited or volunteered, he could not really say.

Later that night, in bed, he talked it over with Mel—told her how it would probably be his last prospect, and how it felt like that whole part of his life was slipping away, as if sealed beneath ice, and how he wanted one more glimpse. He told her how he wanted it to be a dry hole—though he knew it wouldn't be—and how he wanted to be out on the rig—wanted to be among the first to know, one of the first to see what he had discovered.

He told her the money gotten from two weeks of work on the rig would be enough to carry them, and the baby, through whole other years.

“It's okay,” she said. “You don't have to explain.”

“This will be the last one,” he said.

“Shhh,” she whispered. She didn't want him to tell her something that might later turn into a lie. Then she realized what a peculiar thought that was, as if a mountain could turn into a sea, or a desert into a forest.

 

Slowly the valley was being revealed and returned to them as the smoke pulled away, leaving patches of blue sky above. The wolves had left the valley, so that there was a silence, but the autumn nights grew frostier by a degree or two each night, and the leaves of cottonwood and aspen, as well as the needles of larch trees, burned gold amidst the partially blackened landscape—though as the smoke cleared in tatters and streamings, the villagers could see that there was still much among the forest—the deep green-blues of spruce and fir—untouched.

The gold cottonwoods and aspen, as well as the gold candles of the larch, had grown brighter during the last week, though they had a peculiar timeless, burnished look, as if the smoke had softened them, like scraps of hide or leather worked by hand. The yellow sunlight of late September struck them as if it had come to rescue them, but still they began falling from the trees, falling in the least breeze and landing on the blackened landscape like golden coins or needles. They cast a net, a mesh, across the charred land, and held the coals and ashes in place, as if claiming those ashes, not wanting to let them be blown or washed away. Tumblewheels and dervishes of yellow leaves skittered in front of the tongues of any breeze, and the winds were colder now, though still the sun in the middle of the day carried warmth. The fires up in the mountains had for the most part stopped their runs, and had boxed themselves into corners and were trapped, dying out, gnawing at nothing.

“Don't let him hurt you,” was the last thing Mel said to Wallis before he went off to work that first day. She fixed two lunches: one for herself to take to school, and one for him to take to the rig. Cheese sandwiches, and an apple. They were out of meat. “Be careful,” she said. “Don't let them hurt you.”

 

They rowed Dudley across the river in a high wooden dory. They took a wheelbarrow with them, with which to transport Old Dudley, once on the other side: to save his old energy, he said, for the task at hand. There wasn't room in the dory for the wheelbarrow and the three of them, so Matthew swam, slowly, crossways to the current.

Once across, Matthew lay in the sun spitting out river water while Dudley sat in the shade and waited for him to recover. It was already warm and there were no morning clouds. Old Dudley, who had been studying Matthew the way a fisherman might view a beached and rot-bloating mullet or suckerfish, tapped his watch and said that it was only a ten-year lease they had from the government, and that if they didn't hurry up someone else was going to go in there and take it and drill it themselves.

Matthew rolled over onto his hands and knees, then rose stiffly. He pulled down fresh fir limbs and placed them in the wheelbarrow to form a seat, to give padding for Old Dudley, and then helped him in.

Once Dudley was situated—sitting cross-legged like a swami—they set off down Red's new road.

Old Dudley was heavy—like unnumbered sacks of wet concrete. They took turns pushing him. His face was serene as he tried to get a feel for the thing he would begin destroying in a few days. His face was at times slightly expectant, too, like a well-behaved child at Christmas anticipating the possibility of a gift. He looked around at the cathedral shafts of light coming down through the trees, and at the soft flutter and sound and movements of birds in the canopy high above—the lime-green and coal-black wispy lichens hanging above like seaweed—and he was calm, and rode like a dignitary. Occasionally they would pass a gravelly creek flecked with nuggets of pyrite and shiny wafers of mica, like children's glitter poured into the stream, which caught Dudley's eye with a far keener interest than did the birds or trees; and as they crossed these shallow creeks, moving their way upstream along the big river, he would stare up each little creek-canyon and sniff, flaring his nostrils, would glare unblinking up toward each creek's source, scowling, and Wallis could almost see his mind working things out, evaluating the lithology of source rock above and weaving out in his mind the story of its slow destruction, dissipation, and redistribution below—the ongoing web of mountain death that was gushing down the creeks at the rate of a millimeter per year.

They pushed on. When it was Wallis's turn to push him, Dudley would twist and look back at Wallis balefully, as if distrustful of Wallis not to dump him—but when finally he had made his point clear, he would twist back in his perch and continue his survey, voiceless all the while.

A large bird, the dark shape of a raptor, flew through the trees. Dudley twisted to follow the bird's quick flight. “Goshawk,” he said. “Northern goshawk.” He stared in the direction the goshawk had flown. “Male,” he said finally, “immature male.”

After two miles, they stopped for water. Matthew and Wallis crouched at the river and drank from it like lions; Dudley, though thirsty—his balding head gleaming—remained in the wheelbarrow. When they resumed their journey and came around the last bend and saw the rig erect amidst the forest, untouched by the fires, it was to all three of them as if they had come upon an altar, some shrine built by souls more kindly and intelligent and worshipful of beauty than their own.

“Sweet motherfucker,” Dudley said, and climbed out of the wheelbarrow. He ascended the hinged steel ladderworks as if going up the outside fire escape of an abandoned office building. The rig's motors had run dry after the crew had fled the fires, but Dudley found some drums of diesel and got the engines going again with no more trouble than a man starting a garden tractor or a chain saw. The noise, after so much silence, fractured the quietness like an exploding tree.

Old Dudley and Matthew climbed up into the crow's nest and as the sluggish drilling fluid began circulating into the hole again, Dudley wrestled another stand of pipe into position and called down to Wallis, explaining to Wallis how to set the tongs to hold the pipe in the hole and then break the thread in order to screw in a new stand of pipe.

Wallis did as he was told. All his work before had been in the office, on the maps, in the abstract, and this was not an unpleasant feeling—leaning in against the force of the tongs, wrapping the chain around the new pipe and then leaning back with the huge wrench to fasten in the new pipe, and feeling in that moment the precision fit of the threads. The earth seeming to accept another length of pipe.

Matthew climbed down from the crow's nest and told Wallis he was a natural. He and Wallis stood there on the derrick floor, watching the shining steel pipe disappear so slowly, an inch every few minutes, into the hole.

Dudley, dressed in a pair of Matthew's old overalls, hosed down the drill pipe as Matthew and Wallis lowered it into the hole, and Wallis thought how it must seem to Dudley as if he had gone back in time half a century: as if he were roughnecking, working so long ago on one of his first rigs out in West Texas, and how too it must have seemed to him as if there were a fault or fissure in time, a setting-back of things, in a way that was vital and necessary—and Wallis thought that it must have been pleasing, even heady, for Dudley to feel so young and strong again.

It took about half an hour for each new length of pipe to chew down to its full length—about a foot a minute. The noise was deafening, so that it precluded all daydreaming, though in its own brute way it was hypnotic. Often, that first day, Wallis found himself staring down at the earthen tank of drilling mud next to the rig, sloppy and frothy. It seemed to him like some artificial pond or aquarium in which dwelt the most hideous creature, so awful that it could never be seen by humanity.

“How deep will you go?” Matthew shouted to Dudley, over the diesel roar. Dudley was up in the crow's nest again, swinging the pipe into position, while the two younger men below worked the tongs. “How deep will we go?”

“To the bottom of the fucking world,” Dudley brayed, “to the United fucking States of China.” He kept hosing the pipe, which was shiny and silver. Mud and river water dripped in sheets from up on the rig floor, a sound like rain, though it was a bright blue day. It was a messy operation, Wallis thought—like cleaning and butchering a deer, or an elk, or a moose.

There wasn't time for daydreaming: Wallis could see that right away. It was different from his old life—the days he'd been spending with Mel. If you took your eyes off what you were doing or allowed your mind to wander even a slight distance, you'd get your ass kicked; you'd have five hundred pounds of pipe fall on you, or you'd get a hand, even an arm, wrapped up in things, and lose it. It was all chain-rattle and torque, all wrench and clatter.