Where the Sea Used to Be (24 page)

Old Dudley did not get into the valley often, and when he did, he delighted in buying drinks for the house, all day or all night—for however long he was in the bar. He enjoyed being around the savages, as he called them. For a few hundred dollars he could afford to buy them all drinks for days on end, if he wished—as if they were fish in an aquarium that had gathered for him to observe, as he fed them—and they in turn were delighted to be able to examine him. They found him more savage and fascinating than any creature in the woods, and their response to him was a strange mixture of respect and ridicule. He was clearly talented at what he did—how else could he have earned so much money?—and understood the subterranean workings of the earth far more intimately and in more specific detail than they could ever imagine. But of his oil-finding ability, all they knew was what they had seen, which was that he had thus far failed nineteen times in their valley. Some worried that he might soon stop coming to the valley if it didn't soon produce something for him. Such was their economy that he could spend two hundred dollars in an evening and six months later, a hundred and fifty of it would still be in the valley.

When the rigs came, there was very little money that went into the valley directly—the payments instead went to outside contractors, and the trucks involved in the hauling of equipment were run by outsiders, as were the crews involved in the drilling—but the spectacle of the operation, surreal and monstrous—the rig towering up with the trees; the clanging and hissing and roaring of motors—brought some entertainment to the valley, during the long, lazy two months of summer; and occasionally, one of the rig workers would buy a pack of crackers or a can of sardines from the mercantile; and they patronized the bar as well, though not with the enthusiasm that might be expected, so tired were they from the day's or night's work. They lived in a squalid tent camp down by the river, when they came, and bathed in the river and killed deer out of season, does with fawns, and cooked them continuously over large sprawling ragged fires down by water's edge; and each spring, after they were gone, the high water of runoff scoured away their leavings.

As with anything of this nature, the valley was somewhat divided on the issue of whether the drilling was a good thing or a bad thing; but it was always a dry hole, and the rigs always went away, and the quiet, the peace, always returned, like vegetation growing back in over a scratched-bare spot, or like a scar knitting flesh back together.

So they welcomed Dudley as a pack of dogs welcome one of their own: everyone rising and coming up to touch him—to shake his hand or pat his back or grip his shoulder—and they welcomed Matthew with even greater zeal—as if he were some kind of prodigal, Wallis noted—and with some large measure of relief, too, as if there had been a collective fear among them that one day he would not come back.

And Wallis could feel it, as if he were already one of the locals: a settling or shifting of things—of the entire valley, is what it felt like—so that things seemed to fit once more as they had, and in a manner around which other things had been designed or adjusted.

Mel, Wallis, and Helen hung back, accepted a few greetings, filtered into the crowd. There were the usual odors of smoke, alcohol, sweat, and adrenaline; but mixed in with it were the buffering odors of fir and spruce sap, snow, and horses.

Dudley pulled out a wad of hundred-dollar bills, the stack of them as thick as a big hamburger, put two down on the counter, rang the cowbell to announce the free drinks, and a cheer went up.

People kept swarming around the two men, kept touching Matthew, as if to see if he were still real, after so long down in the city.

Wallis sat at a back table with Helen and Mel and watched the snow come down. The sight of it was utterly hypnotic. Wallis felt as if he were viewing the white noise in his own mind; that the snow was passing through his mind and cleansing it with its passage. It did not seem to matter that he was working for a buffoon.

“Remember,” Mel said—her voice startled him—“one drink. Make it last.”

Wallis smiled. “Maybe two, since it's Christmas.”

“Not me,” said Mel. “Just one for me.”

Danny came over and joined them, as did Amy and Colter. Colter was wearing a new necklace of shining teeth on a deer hide thong, and everyone exclaimed over it: another find from Zeke's tanning shed. Mel leaned in and touched each tooth, named them as she touched them. Grizzly, coyote, wolf, beaver. The ivory eyeteeth, little hidden tusks, of elk. Lion. Badger.

“My word,” Mel said, “I had no idea.” She could barely speak. Her hand lingered on the necklace. “It's so beautiful.” She was quiet for a long moment. “What does it feel like, to have it on your chest?”

“It feels good,” Colter said. He started to take it off to let her try it on.

“No,” said Mel, “it's yours—your father's.”

“Well,” said Colter, “it feels good.”

“I imagine it does,” said Mel.

Old Dudley had purchased a bottle of rum and had climbed up on the counter and was proclaiming loudly about something, they couldn't hear what—clearly using up air space to keep people from paying too much attention to Matthew. Gusts of snow blew in through the open doorway, but no one made a move to get up and shut the door.

Amy poured beer for everyone at their table except for Colter; emptied the pitcher. A look of pleasure, even contentment in her eyes, despite the recent loss of her husband. She smelled the empty pitcher and closed her eyes: remembered growing up in Pennsylvania, her father and six brothers drinking beer at lunch, at supper: remembered them drinking it like water as they plowed and broke the black soil. When a horse went lame or needed resting, one of the brothers, each over six feet tall and weighing more than three hundred pounds, would step into the traces and pull until the horse healed.

“Were you born here,” Wallis asked Danny, “or did you come from someplace else?” It seemed to him that hardly anyone—Helen, Matthew, and maybe a couple of others—had been born here. As if it were instead only a place to come to.

Danny smiled sadly, realizing for the first time that Wallis could not possibly know his circumstances: that it had not been gotten by osmosis.

“I came here in grief,” he said. “A place to start over. From Florida. I was a bronc rider.” He peered at Wallis sidelong. “Do you want to know the specifics?”

It seemed rude to say no; it seemed salacious to say yes.

“People around me were getting sick,” Danny said. “My wife, my old parents—my wife's kids from an earlier marriage. She was pregnant with our first.

“They started dying—some fast, like my old man, with his heart attack—but others, real slow. Cancers and such. Right before my wife died—the baby was never born—her old mother told me it was my fault, that it was a curse—that I was not living a path of righteousness, that I was being cursed for being away from home too much. No offense,” Danny said, with a glance at Amy, “but she was a big churchgoer.” He shook his head, though how many times in the twenty years since had he told the story? Laying it down each time like a foundation, like steppingstones across some dark river.

“She even got my wife thinking that way, before she died,” Danny said. “Funny thing was, it probably
was
my fault, unintentionally; there was probably some damn nuclear waste in the soil, or invisible night fumes from some refinery that settled where we were living. People in that neighborhood were always getting sick, and I couldn't afford to move us to a better location; or I didn't think I could. And we had a good time,” he said. “We had a good life. But after that, I lost it. After the funeral—five of them in two years—her old momma kept hounding me, kept after me like some little dickey bird chasing an owl. I was drinking and doing drugs, and one day she came over there to yap in my face—damn near crazy herself—and I hit her.” Danny looked Wallis straight in the face. “I hit her hard. I went ape-shit. They had to put her in the hospital. I've never been sorrier for anything in my life.

“I did my three years, then came out here. I didn't even know ‘out here' was here; I just headed this way, and stopped when I realized this was where I needed to be.

“The day I got out of jail, her old husband—Lucinda's stepfather—was waiting for me with a gun—a little pissant Saturday night special. I got off the bus in town and he was waiting there for me, and shot me with it, but the pistol blew up in his hand,” Danny said. “Some of the bullet went into me—went right through my ribs—and some of the gun shrapnel cut up his hand. There was a lot of blood.

“I didn't say a damn thing,” Danny said. “I took off my shirt and wrapped up what was left of his hand in it, took him down the street to a doctor's office, checked him in—blood was coming out of my ribs at a pretty good clip—and I just kept on going. I knew the battery in my old truck would be dead, so I bought a new one, and walked home with it. It was August, about a hundred degrees, and the heat and blood loss was making me dizzy. I got home, drank about a gallon of water straight from the garden hose—swapped batteries, hosed myself off in the front yard, slept til dusk beneath a shade tree, then woke up and got in my truck and headed out.

“I still don't feel like I paid my dues or debts,” Danny said, staring at his hands. “It's not like I feel
absolved
or anything. I guess it just feels like that was then and this is now.”

Wallis held the story for a while. “Were you a good bronco rider?” he asked, finally.

“Naw,” Danny said, “that's the hell of it. I wasn't worth a damn, really. I just enjoyed it, was all.”

“Do you think back to it much?” Wallis asked.

“Nah. Probably no more than once or twice a day now. Not like what I used to.”

Up on the counter, Old Dudley had rung the bell again and had rolled up a piece of posterboard to form a sort of megaphone. He was braying about his hawks and eagles, shouting their story so loudly that there was no way anyone else could have told another story anyway.

He was talking about when he had first started looking for oil and gas—when he and his wife and Mel, just a baby, had been living out in West Texas. They rented a little one-bedroom, one-bath adobe house for thirty-five dollars a month. There were hawks and eagles all around the house—the newspapers on the floor had to be changed daily—and when Old Dudley went out into the oil fields, he would take his hawks with him, to train, while the rig drilled almost ceaselessly deeper. It was long, slow work, waiting for the well to reach its final destination. All the craft had been expended in preparing the prospect for drilling—in creating the map—and then it would be expended again, interpreting the results once the well was finished—taking the data and altering and revising those maps—but during the in-between time there was just a lot of straight-ahead drilling, and it was Dudley's job back then to simply be within rough shouting distance should something occur.

As he lectured, his voice boomed across the bar. No one could do anything but listen.

“I remember being out dawn til dusk some days,” he was saying. “I'd hunt six birds in a day. I'd keep 'em hot and fresh. And when I wasn't hunting the old one, I'd be training the young ones. I was a good trainer. You have to start when the birds are little. They're too wild at first—they don't want to do what you ask of them—they kill, but by nature they don't want to bring back what they kill and hand it over to you—and so you have to forge this bond. You have to alter their nature.

“The simplest way, when you've got 'em young like that, is to just wear the fuckers out,” he said. “You keep 'em awake—you stay awake, too, with them—for however long it takes to wear them out: three, four, five days in a row, day and night.

“Every time the bird tries to rest, you wake it back up—sometimes you even devil it a bit—and it flies at you in a rage, screeching and clawing. You have to wear a leather suit, like armor—and you let it wear itself out like that, until the wildness goes away, and its will becomes instead your will.

“It was a long time ago,” he said, “when I was raising all those young hawks and falcons—but I was good at it.” Dudley laughed. “They'd be all over the house—each on a different perch, and out in the garage. They stole the baby's toys”—he glanced out at Mel, in the audience, almost as if not realizing she had been that baby—“and Madelyn, my wife, was always afraid they'd snatch the baby up—that they'd mistake her for prey while she was crawling around beneath them.” He studied Mel now as if for signs of scars from almost forty years ago. “They never did though,” he said. “I told her they wouldn't, and they didn't. There were some places where they wouldn't hunt, simply because I didn't want them to. Their will was my will,” he said again.

He was shouting now, like a preacher. “I made those birds. God made them and then I took them from God and turned them around in the other direction and made them into something else.

“There is this lightness the bird gets when it is on your arm, and when it is finally exhausted—when it finally gives up,” Old Dudley sang. “When it gets to that point—when you have won—you can actually feel something leaving the bird, and can feel it getting lighter as a result, until it is almost weightless. God, it's sweet when that happens,” he said. “Usually sometime around the fourth or fifth day. You'd think they'd fight longer. Considering I own them forever, once this happens.”

Colter's face had grown more serious throughout the recitation, so that now it was in sharp contrast to all the other faces around him, who were enjoying the entertainment. Colter leaned across the table to speak to Wallis, though Mel and the others at the table could hear him too.

“I don't like him,” he said, and then sat back in his chair, brooding.