Where the Sea Used to Be (7 page)

“Danny stopped here to rest for a while,” she said. “It was night by that time. The heat from his lantern melted the snow in the trees and it ran down the tree trunks. Then when he moved on, it got cold and froze again.”

The trees glittered. Now the path was easy to follow—a winding path through the woods, the injured deer always choosing the easiest route, and the trees shimmering in their ice coats, as if in some beautiful hallway. Mel and Wallis knew that the proof of the deer's passage, the blood and the tracks, lay just beneath them, beneath the snow.

By the time they neared town, they were drenched with sweat and discolored by some of the deer's blood that had leaked from their packs. Though it was only mid-afternoon, the sun had peaked and was in fast descent. They stopped to drink water from a trickling creek: took off their packs and crouched in the snow and lapped the water straight from the creek, to avoid wetting their hands.

They skied back into town and left their skis stuck in the snow in front of the bar. The sweat and blood had started to freeze on them again, but now in the heat of the bar it melted quickly, running down them in a sheen. They said nothing but unloaded their packs, laying the mahogany antlers on the floor and stretching the furred hide out. Danny came over, grinning, and gave Mel a hug. He shook Wallis's hand enthusiastically—and when Mel said to Wallis, “Go on, show him what you found,” and Wallis handed Danny his knife, they thought Danny was going to explode out of his skin. Danny whirled in dervish circles and bounced up and down like a man on a pogo stick, holding the knife in both hands—Wallis thought at first he had been drinking, but Mel told him later that no, that was just the way he was—and Danny hugged them both now, almost lancing Wallis with the knife as he did so, and rang the cowbell at the bar's counter, announcing free drinks for all. Then he dropped to one knee and ran his hands through the deer's hide, admiring it, and found the four holes—two entries, two exits—of the bullets; found them hidden beneath the thick fur, and examined each one with his fingers.

And while Artie, the bartender, was pouring drinks, Danny took the antlers and went over to one corner of the bar and with hammer and nails tacked them to the wall, with the fur still fresh upon the skullplate. Wallis felt dizzy from the heat and weakened from the rigor of packing the deer out, and from the shock of his drink, a rum and Coke. He imagined what those antlers would look like twenty years hence, and how the story behind them would be told—perhaps altered slightly, its boundaries compressed here or expanded there, as if the story itself were a thing that was still moving across the landscape, along with the cultures and lives of the humans who carried it . . . and Wallis wasn't sure he liked that feeling. Part of him was proud to be accepted into this—what? village? clan? pack?—so soon, even if in a small way—but another part of him wanted to take the antlers down and have the story, and the day, slide away into darkness.

But it was too late. Danny was packing the meat into his propane freezer, wrapping it and labeling each cut of it, and Charlie—the big man with the black beard and the cleaver, from the day before—was searing some of the meat in a skillet on the big wood stove, salting and peppering it as he cooked, and passing out samples to everyone; and the story, the moment, was alive and well on its own, beyond Wallis's control.

Wallis began looking at some of the old photos on the wall. There were so many of them, and yet he understood that this was almost all there was: that this valley was still so new to the world, so recently wrested free of glaciers, and inhabited marginally by humans, that this was it—there was almost nothing else beyond what was on the walls. The Indians had hunted the high valley in the autumns, but had never settled there. It had been even colder then, so close to the time of glaciers, and before the earth had begun its slow warming, like a face turning slowly toward the sun.

Charlie threw more wood in the stove—big logs, each seeming as long as a small canoe. His face shone with sweat, and he grinned, as if he loved only those two things in the world—cooking and sweating: as if he could not get close enough to the fire. He was wearing only a T-shirt and jeans; he did not own a coat.

There were so many photos of Matthew, and of Matthew and Mel together—so young, already so long ago. Wallis found it hard to believe this was the same man he had shared an office with: a volatile man whose sole focus was diving and striking at the oil, and who did so with eerie, overwhelming success.

In some of the photos, he was just a boy with a rifle—a brace of grouse set before him, a dog, a picture of the boy in snow, on snowshoes—and a young clear-eyed man standing next to an elk, and in another photo, a monstrous deer.

Photos of Matthew lounging in a hammock with Mel—eighteen, nineteen years old? (Wallis had never seen Matthew sleep before, except when he occasionally fell asleep at the drafting table late at night, and lay there with his head down for a while, as if listening to the map he had just drawn)—and photos of Mel and Matthew ice-fishing, and photos of them canoeing in summer. Mel in a straw hat. All black and white photos; all ancient, it seemed. Wallis stared, tried to remember being young with Susan. He had saved nothing from that life. He couldn't believe Mel's and Matthew's youth. Twenty years had never seemed so long to him.

There were older photos, too: from fifty, sixty, seventy years ago. He peered closer. The men and women from back then definitely looked different, as did the country, in some slight way.

Danny came over to where Wallis was studying the photos—studying them as if for a test—and he, in his exuberance, was wrapped in the deer hide. He clapped a hand on Wallis's shoulder, squeezed the muscles between his neck and shoulder, and called back to Mel, “With all that sweat and blood on him, except for being a little on the puny side, he even kind of looks like Matthew.”

“I shape them that way,” Mel said, laughing. She had finished her drink.

“Old Dudley shapes them that way,” Danny said.

Wallis went back to sit with Mel, and to have a drink. It seemed important to have only one, or possibly two. He imagined how easy it would be, in the midst of all the snow—but secure and warm in the bar—to start drinking and not stop until the days grew bright and long again.

He had been away from his work for a week: the longest ever. One more drink. Mel looked at him and smiled, remembering the simplicity of the day: hauling meat.

The door opened and with it came a blast of cold air, made colder to those inside by their having become accustomed to the warmth, and in the doorway stood a tiny old woman, tottery not from the cold or the wind, but from age. She had wild thinning white hair, and there was snow on her back and shoulders—a blizzard was coming, the season's first big storm—and someone shouted, “Close the door, Helen!”

She was wearing old wooden snowshoes, and she clumped across the floor in them, sat down at Mel's and Wallis's table, and began unbuckling the leather straps, glaring first at Mel and then at Wallis in a way that told Wallis the old woman was a fan of Matthew's.

Mel introduced them. “Wallis, this is Helen—Matthew's mother. Helen, this is Wallis—Old Dudley's other geologist.”

Wallis stood and reached out his hand to shake. Helen didn't want to take it, but had to. “Where are you staying?” Helen asked.

“In Matthew's cabin,” Wallis said, and she scowled.

“Helen runs the mercantile across the street,” Mel said. “We couldn't get along without her.” She patted Helen's arm, and there was some immediate softening. She looked like she was a hundred years old. “Helen raised Matthew since he was four years old,” Mel said. “She didn't take delivery of him til she was forty-two.”

Wallis didn't want the second drink, but the first one was gone. Artie came over and sat at the table with them, bringing everyone a new round, and there were still stories to be told.

“By took delivery of, she means adopted,” Helen explained. “His real mother got pneumonia. She fell through the river while she was deer hunting. Matthew's father pulled her out and rescued her, but she got pneumonia and died. Matthew was three. She'd been pregnant again, but of course the baby didn't get born. Matthew's father died a year after that. He just quit living. You ever see anybody do that?” Helen asked Wallis, and he looked away, didn't answer.

“Grandma Helen,” Artie said—not a salutation or a question, simply a statement, a naming. “You raised a good boy.” Artie stared down for a moment, then turned to Wallis. “What does he
do
down there?” he asked, and for a moment Wallis thought he meant, What is it like, beneath twenty thousand feet of stone? But then he understood that Artie meant only Texas, and the Gulf Coast—and that furthermore, “down there” or “out there” could just as easily be anywhere in the world, as long as it was on the other side of these mountains.

“He's happy,” Wallis said, a little defensively. “He loves it more than anything.” A glance at Mel to see if it hurt her, and he saw that it hadn't.

“Yeah, but I mean, what does he
do?”

“Well, he sits at his drafting table and makes maps,” Wallis said.

“Maps
,” Artie said. He looked around the bar and seemed on the verge of a philosophy lecture, but in the end only took another drink and shook his head.

Now the stories came rolling in like waves—Matthew this and Matthew that—and Wallis wondered if they could be talking about the same man he worked with. He was still physically strong, and in some ways reckless—though to Wallis it seemed as if the recklessness had been transformed, under Old Dudley's guidance, into more of a gluttony—and Wallis had the strange feeling that they were talking about someone from another lifetime, even another century.

If Matthew still had the strength—the flamboyant strength they were talking about—then Wallis had not seen it. He was a great geologist, but all that myth lore—if Matthew was still that way, it must be only underground now, in his dives.

Wallis listened to stories of Matthew performing feats of strength—carrying propane refrigerators on his back, even as a boy—and of unbounded energy, as if in eternal adolescence, eternal growth—stripping naked in the summer and covering himself with a film of gasoline, then lighting himself on fire and leaping out of the bushes anc| into the river, into the back eddy where the swans used to rest, back when there had still been swans in the valley, thirty years ago.

“I saw him do it a couple times,” Artie said. “He'd go ass-busting out there, all lit-up, and splash down right in the middle of all those swans. The swans wouldn't make a sound—they don't utter a peep until the day they die. I guess that's why he was fucking with them, trying to see if he could get them to croak, or peep, or make
some
damn sound—and sometimes he'd even grab one by the wing, or brush against it as he went into the river, and that swan would get a little gasoline on it, and for a few moments, while it was rising into the air and then flying, part of the swan would be on fire. I tell you what,” Artie said, “it was a thing to see. Matthew would bob up to the surface and float there, and just laugh. It was always just a film of gas that would get on the swans—the flame would burn out before it did any damage to the feathers, or to the bird itself—but it was a sight to see. You could be working in town and look up and see seven or eight swans flying past, over the tops of the trees, with one of them on fire, and you'd know he was down there fucking with those birds.”

“He was such a sweet boy,” Helen said. “Such a fun boy. I was always having to run behind him to be sure he didn't hurt himself. I was an old woman, even then.” She touched her weathered face and laughed. “My God, he aged me. He wore me out,” she said. “In the summer, you could see burnt bushes all up and down the river from where he'd hidden, lit himself, and then gone running through the brush. He tried to get farther from the river each time. It looked like otter-slides, up and down the river. Sometimes I'd get to the river and find some bushes still burning, and the swans would be gone, and I wouldn't see any Matthew, wouldn't know where he was. I'd call and call for him, and he wouldn't come in til late that night, or sometimes even the next day; said he'd gone
exploring,
had gone up into the mountains.”

Helen pressed her hand to her heart, which Wallis imagined to be about the size of a pea or a raisin, now.

Stories of his endurance. “That dang wall,” Artie said.

Helen smiled, and explained to Wallis, “He started building it when he was seven. Just started hauling rocks in from the mountains and stacking them. Then when he began driving his jeep, he hauled them in that.”

Wallis had seen those pictures, also yellowed and ancient, in the hallway that led to the bar's restrooms. In those photos, not just Matthew, but all manners of men, women, and children had been carrying and stacking the big square rocks. “I thought they were miners,” Wallis said, “or workers in some quarry somewhere.”

Helen shook her head. “Matthew started it, but by the time he was sixteen, the thing was twenty miles long, and so beautiful that the rest of us started helping him with it—working on it whenever we pleased, like a hobby.” Helen reached in her coat for a pack of cigarettes, tried to light one. Wallis watched the hypnotic snap of her lighter, which finally took flame. Helen's hand shook afterward, just from that simple exertion.

“I was out back, bringing wood from the shed to the porch,” she said, motioning to her snowshoes.

Mel said, “Oh shit, Helen, I'm sorry, I forgot,” and Helen shrugged, clearly pleased with her martyrdom. “We'll haul some in for you tonight,” Mel said. She told Wallis, “I always help Helen bring her wood in. Matthew used to do it before he went away, but now I do it every autumn. It's already cut and in the woodshed, curing. I just need to bring it to the back porch.”