Where the Sea Used to Be (2 page)

But it was Old Dudley's tong marks that caused the greatest unpleasantness in his appearance. There was a matched set of indentations on either side of his skull, dark creases like shadows that did not change or wane even when he stepped into the light: an ancient birthmark, the signature of forceps. It gave him an alien, reptilian look, and there was no way to view the tong marks without understanding that to come into the world, he had to have been pulled, kicking and screaming, from his mother—not wanting to leave that aqueous, other world, and not wanting to ascend to this one, either.

He had a way of seeing straight into the heart and weakness of a person, in the moment that any of them saw him for the first time. During the brief nakedness of that first startled moment, as they viewed his tong marks, he could see—for a few seconds—all the way into and through a person.

He would not have traded this gift, this power, for anything in the world.

 

Of late, Dudley had been running with two geologists rather than just one, which was invigorating to him: an older, experienced one, already knee-deep in the rubble and flame, Matthew, and a newer one, Wallis, whom he had found in the Texas hill country, and had been unable to pass up.

Wallis had been working behind a store counter in a country grocery store, reading a book on a slow breezy blue October Saturday, and this had reminded Old Dudley somehow of his only daughter, his only child: the way the young clerk fell out of this world and into whatever lay below.

In Old Dudley's view, book-reading was usually the kiss of death for the kind of geologist he was searching for. He needed someone more likely or willing to make that leap across those jagged chasms—more willing to attempt to convert the imagined to the real, the physical. Book-readers, he knew, didn't want to make that leap—wanted instead to keep everything nice and safe and comfortable, all imagined, at arm's length. Better to hire a plow horse or a mule than a book-reader. But Wallis seemed somehow different—not like a practiced book-reader, but a crude one. He had undeniably the scent, the potential, and Dudley could not resist him.

Could Dudley handle two geologists at once? He didn't know, but now when one burned or was crushed out, the other would only be hitting his stride. There wouldn't be the long waiting period of transition in which Old Dudley had to start over from scratch, molding a new one from loose clay. When Dudley had been younger, that had been part of the pleasure. But now such patience was not in him.

He didn't know how the two would work together—Matthew and Wallis. They might waste too much time and energy chewing each other up: there might be friction expended that would detract from their seamless plunges into the lands below. He didn't know. But he knew he had to choose Wallis: knew it even before he saw Wallis look up slowly from his book; knew it even before he saw Wallis's blue eyes, rimmed red from grief, grief that could come from only one thing—the loss of a loved one.

Dudley didn't need to ask a word. He could read scents and gestures as other men and women might read a newspaper. He could follow these scents straight into their seams of weakness—the soft places. He might not know the specifics of Wallis's grief—that for fifteen years Wallis had lived with his girlfriend and her old grandfather and their horses along a creek, and that she, Susan, had died six months ago, and that weeks later, with his old heart broken, her grandfather had followed her in death. Dudley could not read the specifics of how their life had been, there along that creek amidst the live oaks and beneath the half-domes of granite that the Indians used to call holy—domes of polished granite looming all around them, smooth and pink as muscles, glinting with reflected star- and moonlight. He could not know the sounds the creek made—different at night, then different in the day, and different in all the seasons, too—but Dudley could know the flavor of these things, and knew that Wallis had lost these and more—that Wallis had lost everything—and hungry, he rushed in to snatch up Wallis. Perhaps in his old age and his haste he was making a mistake, but he didn't think so, book-reader or not. Wallis reminded him so much of Mel.

And to Wallis, dwelling in that land of grief, it had seemed at the time as if he were being rescued. He had followed Old Dudley down to Houston, had put away his books, and had begun learning to read the stories below him: not a few inches below, and not a hundred or two hundred feet down, but instead, almost all the way down—almost to the core—losing himself in lands where no one had ever been, or seen, or even imagined; and where certainly there was no such thing as grief.

 

It was like an adoption, or absorption, the way Dudley took these men and molded them into creatures better able to dive into those precipices and chasms: the way he bent their weaknesses in that direction. They thought they were simply becoming his disciples. They did not understand—until it was too late—that the oil beneath the ground, the oil in which they trafficked—the combined molecules of hydrogen and carbon, reassembled from old life into the sour vat of death—was like the old steaming blood of the earth, and that it bound them—Old Dudley and his geologists—with at least as much fidelity as did any blood of humans.

They did not understand, never understood, until it was too late and they were crumbling or afire, that they had come into his family; nor could they conceive—again, not in time—of a beast who ate his family.

 

A year later Dudley cast this second son, Wallis, into the valley. He sent Wallis north with only the crudest of maps, a series of lines sketched on a brown scrap of paper, telling him the name of the valley, the Swan, and the approximate location of it, in northern Montana. They—Old Dudley and Matthew—told him that Dudley's daughter, Mel, was living up there in the snow with the wolves—it was November—and that it was the valley where Matthew had been born. Mel had met Matthew in Montana, and they had become lovers, and still were, of sorts, though for the most part, Old Dudley had succeeded in stealing him from her, so that now Matthew lived year-round with Dudley in Houston, along the Buffalo Bayou, where buffalo had been gone for over a hundred years.

Dudley and Matthew told Wallis that there were two Swan Valleys, up in the northwest corner of the state, and that it was the second, hidden one, where he was supposed to go: that it was the one nobody knew about, the one the century had not yet been able to reach. They said that the second Swan Valley was like a shadow of the first. They told him that Mel would meet him on the valley's summit on a certain date—there was only one road leading in and out of the valley—and that he had to cross over into Canada and then loop south, crossing back over the U.S. line again, in order to get there.

They told him that he would probably fall in love with Mel, and that she might even fall in love with him, but that none of that would matter—it wouldn't last.

Old Dudley was a falconer—less ardent about it than he had been in his youth, though he still kept a couple of falcons tethered on perches in the back yard of his townhouse overlooking the bayou. From time to time he would hunt his falcons on the pigeons that lived under the bridges of the interstate, and would even take them downtown with him to hunt there. Old Dudley instructed Wallis to try to find the oil that neither Dudley nor Matthew had been able to find, and to then return. He gave Wallis a set of instructions, in this regard, as specific as the DNA coding of a cell.

Wallis had lived on the bayou with them for that last year and had watched Old Dudley work the falcons enough to know what Dudley meant: that the falcon would starve without the falconer. A falcon could live either all wild, or wholly captive—but a hunting falcon, one which had been trained to be somewhere between the two—always crossing back and forth between those two lands, hunting whenever the falconer unleashed him, but then sitting idle for two or three days, too weak to fly hard enough to kill, and having to be fed pigeon breasts in order to get its strength up enough to fly and hunt again—that kind of bird could not survive without the falconer.

The penalty—nature's penalty—for failing to learn such a lesson was always death.

They told him all of these things, not so much like predictions, but as if they were seeing them so clearly that it was as if they could see into the future as well as the past: as if the future were just another version of the past, obscured beneath something, but that they could chart and map and manipulate that, too: that nothing could remain hidden from them.

“She's mine,” said Matthew.

“She's probably nobody's,” Wallis said. The two men were not as close as brothers, but perhaps cousins. There was no rivalry; there was only the hunt, which they both loved dearly.

Dudley had never had a geologist last as long beneath his tutelage as had Matthew. Sometimes Old Dudley would wake in the night and have the fearful thought that this one, Matthew, might outlast him—that the scent of metal-against-metal sparks Dudley was smelling this time was coming not from his disciple, but from himself. He would fear for a moment that the sound of loose rubble sliding down the mountain came not from some safely removed distance, but for the first time, from himself. Because such a thing had never happened before, however, Dudley could not imagine it or believe or accept it, and he would label it for what it was, a nightmare, and would get up in the night and go fix a drink and sit at his drafting table beneath the lone overhead lamp, a pool of yellow light in the depth of the blackness all around him, and he would stare with fondness at whatever map lay on the table—the elegance of the map's contours, the feminine curves of buried earth.

“Leave her alone. She's mine,” Matthew said again, as Wallis was leaving.

 

He fled Texas, driving in an old jeep north and west, following no map, knowing only that not until he neared the end of his journey would he need the little scrap of map Dudley and Matthew had sketched for him, though perhaps he would not even need it then. He felt a pull, a tug, and a snatch upon his heart as he crossed over the hill country where Susan was buried, and he slowed, felt her with him as strongly as if she were clawing up out of the ground to be with him, or as if he were being drawn down into that place to be with her. He hesitated, but then thought not so much of the falconer, to whom he had no overbearing allegiance, but of the thing itself that had given his life surge again, the oil, and he kept going, continuing north and west.

Across the dry gold grass of the plains, then—mid-November—beneath swollen, purple winter skies the color of bruises; through sleet, leaving north Texas, and up into the piñón hills of New Mexico, with the smell of smoke in the wood stoves, and magpies flying through the falling snow.

The hawks from the north were in the midst of their autumn migration, and every day, all day, through clearing patches of sky, he would see them heading south, sometimes drifting and soaring, other times flying, but always heading south, so that it gave him a strange feeling to be pushing so resolutely north. One night he camped in a pale arroyo beneath an old railroad trestle that smelled strongly of creosote, but which provided shadow against the relentless moonlight. He awoke in the night to feel the ground trembling and thought at first a flash flood was coming, but then he heard the wail of a train and looked up to see its huge black mass go roaring past twenty feet above him. The sparks from the steel wheels showered down upon him, and long after the train had passed, his heart was still pounding with the excitement and beauty of it—the speed and force with which it had passed.

 

There was no heater in his jeep, and the farther north he got, the more often he had to stop and warm himself: in a restaurant or service station, or, increasingly, by building a fire of sage and juniper, and then, higher, farther north, with fires of fir and spruce. He slept beneath the jeep when snow fell and listened to the snapping of the fire. When he slept sometimes she would come up from behind him, from out of Texas, as if to capture and pull him back down with her—and often he would not sleep but would lie in his sleeping bag watching the fire; and sometimes it would feel as if the world beneath him was still moving, still drawing him north and west, so that his own desires seemed to have no say in the matter: that too much of it was already decided as if by some alignment or movements of the constellations above, or by forces below. He knew this was not the way Old Dudley or Matthew moved through the world—he knew they pinned it down as if with their paws and told the world what to do and how to behave—but Wallis liked watching the fire and letting the earth keep moving along beneath him, with him riding on it.

 

In southern Colorado the snow was coming down so hard that he had to slow to a creep. He drove along at five and ten miles an hour. Deer and elk were coming down out of the mountains, moving down into their winter range, and often they walked alongside him, on either side of his creeping jeep as if in a parade, coming down off the high pass and onto the back side of the Divide. Snow collected on their backs in thick coats. They wore their antlers like kings.

 

He turned west and drifted up and across Utah. He saw almost no one. There was a lure, a pull, now, that turned him north again: up through Idaho, like a salmon. He crawled beneath the jeep, tried to get to sleep quickly, absorbing the last remnants of warmth from the engine, and it kept snowing, burying the winking red coals of the fire he'd built, and then there was the huge silence as the night's new layer of snow settled onto the world, burying everything that had happened during the day, burying all the days. It was possible now, as he drew nearer to the Swan—not like an arrow fired from a bow, but again, like some fish working upstream—to believe that he would have found or been directed toward this place, this rhythm, without instructions—without having been directed toward it by the falconer.