Where the Sea Used to Be (62 page)

The workers would hurry along in Red's burning wake, breaking up the fires with shovels and axes—Red cursing at them over his shoulder, as if the fires were their fault—Red turning savage, almost crazed, for if the fires burned up the forest that was now the road's border, there would be no borders, hence no road—and everyone now, even the outsiders, the road-builders, could feel the forest drying and the south slopes baking and asking for more heat, and for sparks, and for fire.

 

He finished the road. He took pictures of it with a little video camera. He rode the gravel-packed lane—as tight and planar as if he had poured concrete—and from the back of Amy's little pony (the hoofs clopping gently) he filmed it to take home with him. He took pictures of both himself and the crew standing on it, not like artisans but conquerors.

There was a going-away party for the crew—a gathering at the bar, and a feeling of relief on both sides—the villagers happy to be getting their town back, and the workers, ready to flee this dark land—and Wallis went into town for the celebration, and to be sure they were really leaving. Mel was gone—had carried Helen back over to Joshua's to view the finishing touches to the eagle-raven. The woodworking was finished, and now it was being painted—coat after coat of glossy black and gold paint. Yellow eyes, now, rather than opal.

Several of the men were sitting on the porch, having already packed. They were drinking beer, while down in the camp below, others gathered their cookware and folded their tents and cots. It was dusk.

There was the blast of a shotgun, followed by an animal moaning and squalling—Wallis thought at first one of the workers had shot himself—but then he saw the shape of a black bear, Helen's big bear, running awkwardly through the brush, dragging a bloody hind leg and roaring. A man shouted, “I got 'im!” and ran behind the bear with a gun, too excited to reload and shoot again.

The bear went right through what was left of the workers' camp. It ran through their midst, knocking over skillets and pans, and straight down the dock and out into the river.

The bear did not linger in the river, but kept swimming, his broad head striking a hard and resolute V through the dark water of nightfall.

Wallis had thought and hoped it would end there. But even as the ashes were settling from where the bear had run through the fire, the men were dragging their canoes and drift-boats into the water, and they set out paddling after the bear. One of the men pulled an iron surveyor's rod out of the sand, more of a pike than a rod—it was six feet long, like a spear, but solid iron—it weighed forty pounds—and he rode in the bow of one of the boats, while another man paddled.

The men on shore cheered.

For a few moments it looked like the bear might make it. He was about halfway across even before the men launched their boats; but the bear was tiring, and the men were eager, and the distance closed quickly. Wallis wished the bear would dive, like a duck or an otter, but the bear kept swimming. The men circled him with the boats; forced him to swim in circles. They slapped at him with paddles; sometimes they would hit him, and the sound of the flat wood against his skull carried across the water. Wallis shouted at them to leave the bear alone, but now the man with the pike moved in closer, the pike raised high in both hands as a man might harpoon a whale, or perhaps as men had surrounded mastodons and mammoths, in this same country, only a few thousand years ago.

The first blow drove the bear underwater. The pike stuck him in his thick neck, and the sound of it—deeper and different from the paddles—reverberated not through the air, but underwater, and through the water: perhaps to the sea.

For a long time the bear did not come up, and the men began to curse, thinking they had lost it—they all stood up in their boats, waiting—and finally the bear surfaced, fought his way back to the top as if summoned, and the man with the pike wasted no time, struck him again almost immediately, and this time the pike's tip penetrated the bear, rode down between his shoulder blades and lodged at a depth sufficient, Wallis gauged, to have reached his heart, and Wallis turned away, sickened.

The bear sank quickly now, despite the men's attempts to hold on to the heavy pike; and there was a ring in the water, a wake in the center of their boats, where the bear had been, and then nothing, only calm water.

The men did not know how to react at first. But soon it was as if they reached a consensus, as if they had had a communication between themselves without speaking, and they began to cheer, a little halfheartedly at first, but then with real enthusiasm, as if having bluffed themselves into believing, in their own hearts, that loss was instead victory.

 

Red and his crew had not been gone for more than a few hours before townspeople began paddling over to the other side, that same night, in canoes and rafts and drift-boats, to examine the road. Many of those who did not have boats swam. They carried their drinks with them, swimming sidestroke with one arm held above the water, gripping an open bottle of beer, while those in boats paddled with their drinks resting on their bow—an open bottle of wine, or some sweetened fruit drink—a margarita, green as a meadow, or a daiquiri, or some cool blue drink, glowing in the moonlight like a beacon.

They walked the new road, then—walked it like a city street, claiming it, up and down most of its four-mile length—Amy swam her pony over there, and rode sitting sidesaddle—still sore from Dudley's visitation, and looking as if she were about to give birth any minute—and Wallis went over there and walked with them.

They walked it in wonder, marveling at the edges of the great subdued beauty. They strolled, sipping their drinks in that moonlight, all the way to the end, where they milled, trying to sense the oil they had been told was beneath them.

Later they headed home, strung out in small straggling groups, talking among themselves. There was a consensus to bring a picnic table over, or two or three: to set them up along the river for evenings such as these. Some of the townspeople admitted that they wouldn't mind living over there. The road was still immaculate—it could be walked on barefoot—and Wallis knew someday there would be a store over there, too, and roads branching off of the main one, and that soon the weeds of the world would come somehow drifting over the high valley pass and find purchase in the disturbed soil, the arid gravel and dust of the roadbeds.

If the well discovered oil, there would be pipelines and perhaps a small sulphur refinery; but even if it found nothing, the cut had been made, the slash to wildness: and they walked it flat-footed, all of them, admiring it and smelling it and breathing in deeply, always so hungry for the last of the new, and unable to help themselves, unable to turn away.

No one told Helen about the bear. When Wallis got home that night, and settled in to the fit of Mel's arms, he saw that she had black and gold paint on her.

 

The rig, and rig workers, came next. They came like a wave, crossing over the summit and descending into the valley even as the road builders were leaving. The trucks and tractor-trailers came creeping into town as if in a parade: a slow chain of large and small trucks, with the barge immense among them, barely able to negotiate the bends in the road—crushing branches and saplings on either side—and behind it all crept the lying-down framework for the drilling rig itself, being pulled slowly down the road like the deposed king in a funeral procession.

The drilling crew—roughnecks, tool pushers, drillers, and roustabouts—seemed coarser, happier than the road builders, and as they set up camp by the river, where the road builders had also stayed—the sound of hammers striking steel tent stakes—it was as if a circus had come to town.

Wallis and Mel, along with several others from town, walked down to the river and watched them set up. Helen, too tired to walk, watched from her upstairs window. Already a dented mobile home was being set up, with generators and a satellite dish to transmit and receive information. Workers with saws were felling new trees to make more room for the many tractor-trailers that were gridlocked by the river, and they had a big fire going in the center of the camp, though the day was hot as iron and the danger of fires was present in everyone's mind.

Already they were shoving the barge into the river and loading the first of the rig's framework onto it, along with a bulldozer and winch for muscling the iron and steel onto and off the barge.

There were great ropes and chains, huge tanks to act as mud pits, reservoirs for the drilling fluid—the lubricant with which they would enter the earth—and floodlamps too, so that they could work at night.

Amid the din and motion of the machinery and the heat of the bonfire, it seemed to the townspeople that the rig workers had come here to hunt a thing—some huge beast that was moving away from them; and yet it seemed too that the workers had already trapped it, captured it, and that they were here now only to clean and quarter it. Some of the villagers expected to see giant saws and axes, as if to be used in dismembering their quarry.

Mel gripped Wallis's hand tightly, forgiving him. Wallis watched them with fascination and horror: feeling strongly the desire, the urge, to step across and join them in his project. He didn't want them in the valley, but he had summoned them, and now that they were here it seemed false to turn away. He wanted it to be a dry hole, and yet he knew it would not be.

He wanted to be there to touch the oil, when it was found: to smell it, hold the oil in his hands, touch it to his cheeks: oil that was 500 million years old.

The wolves had fallen silent.

 

Even back in their cabin, Mel and Wallis could hear the sounds, carried on the hot breezes, of the workers and their engines—the barges running ceaselessly, carrying equipment back and forth across the river, and the sounds of the rig being assembled: shrill screechings and clanging of pipe, motor-roar, torque of steel, diesel smoke. And when the rig was assembled and began drilling—when the diamond-studded bit first began chewing at the earth—they could hear that too, and could feel it—the dissolution of a tautness whose existence could never be proven. And still Mel forgave Wallis—massaged his neck and shoulders and tried to ease the tensions out of them, understanding the weight of his guilt—though not knowing the confusion of attraction he was feeling, the curiosity and mounting excitement, as the drill bit ate its way deeper and deeper.

She thought that because he lived in a pure landscape he had become pure.

She forgave him and prepared her lesson plans for the coming school year. Fire would come in September, and snow in October. She would have liked to have had a few more days of summer—there were a few more things she would have liked to have done—but they would have to wait until the next cycle.

 

The younger rocks were softer; the drill bit gouged down through them, plunging, as if in free fall, making a thousand feet a day. The harder rocks of the older formations would soon be encountered, and the drilling would slow—Wallis had mapped the oil lying down around seventeen thousand feet—but for now the bit went almost unimpeded through the sands and gravels of the not-too-distant past.

Wallis could not keep away. Some nights as Mel slept he would slip out of bed and go down toward the rig—crossing the river by canoe, other times swimming, and still other times getting a ride across on the barge.

He would travel Red's fine new road until he saw the glow of the rig, the dome of yellow light above the horizon.

Both repelled and attracted by the thunder of the drilling, he would move closer, to the first rig he'd seen in almost a year.

He would come around the corner and stand there just outside the ring of light, watching the tiny figures working high up on the drilling platform, illuminated by the incandescence of halogen lights—a light so intense and all-reaching that it seemed they were searching for the oil with that light rather than with the drill bit: as if the oil had already come to the surface, but had escaped.

The brilliant blue sparks tumbling from the work of a hooded welder below the rig hypnotized him, as did the rawness of the sound: the roaring of the pneumatic drills, and the slamming of metal against metal.

Finally he would pull himself away and walk home. He would bathe in the river so that Mel wouldn't smell the scent of the rig upon him, and back at the cabin he would roll in the dry soil of the garden, then rinse off again in the creek, and sit for a while on the porch, and let the breezes carry from him more of the scents of his infidelity.

He would watch the heat lightning in the distance, would feel the drying forest's ache for fire, and would wonder why it had not come yet.

It was almost maddening: almost too much to take, in the daily waiting. There were none of them who would not have forgiven another, were one of them to snap under the tension and run out into the woods with a match and start it all, to get it over with.

But each small fire ran its course, up in the mountains. A hundred, and then a thousand fires started up, then blinked out. The right place—the one that would allow widespread transmission—had just not been touched yet.

Always, a thin creek here, a mossy cliff there—a shady old grove or a stretch of barren rock—blocked the fires' runs; and each night they blinked on and off on the mountainsides like candles. But as the moisture continued to leave the land, that was all about to change, and everyone knew it.

 

It was Helen who told them the night it was coming. She had lived through all the other fires, and knew their language. She came across the street and told people in the bar that it was coming that night.

People began running back to their homes, frightened but almost invigorated, to pour buckets of water onto their shingled roofs, to dampen them against the coming breath of the fire. Wallis hurried across the street and climbed up on Helen's roof and accepted bucket after bucket from Mel as she handed them up to him. The water ran off the roof in sheets as he emptied the buckets over the cedar-shake shingles. Mel passed the buckets up to him until he had all of the roof wetted.