Where the Sea Used to Be (61 page)

She didn't take it personally. She knew that the weak flesh shrouded a great mind. Still, she hoped he hadn't hurt the baby. She felt terribly responsible, for having let him inside her in the first place.

She dreamed that it was late autumn, and that the baby was already born, and was two years old, playing in the sunlight. She dreamed that Colter came home—a grown man, in the dream—and did not recognize his brother.

 

Dudley did not sleep long. He ascended back into consciousness as if shedding the dead skin of sleep, or as if dressing in a newer, cleaner suit of clothes. He did not pull on a shirt but merely pulled on the saggy overalls as if stepping into a sack. He lit a lantern and, feeling his age—his knees raw from his calisthenics with Amy, his back aching—he descended into the basement again and began unpiling the empty boxes, ferreting out the map. He knocked a can of flour over, and because he was hungry, and too sore to climb back up, he ate cupped handfuls of that as he worked, digging deeper.

He found the cedar chest and broke the little lock with one of the specimen stones, bloodying his knuckles as he did so. He unrolled the hides; found Wallis's map at the bottom, and rolled it out and studied it, read it, recognizing its authority immediately.

And that was how Wallis and Mel found him, when they got back, hours later, and went down into the basement to see what was sending up the lantern glow. Dudley was still seated there, reading and studying the map—committing it to memory, every roll and swale, cliff and crevice—reading it as if the stone below were still moving—reading it as a sailor might watch waves at sea. He was coated with white flour, and his knuckles were smeared with a cakey mix of blood and flour, and when he heard them enter his lair he looked up slowly, like a Buddha—his face white and round and as serene as the moon's—and smiled.

 

W
ALLIS AND MEL HAD TROUBLE BELIEVING THE FORCEFULNESS
with which he moved. It was not with spendthrift panic, nor impulsiveness, but rather, a steady accruing of power. Wallis could not help but think that it was as when a hawk folds its wing and falls—no longer a hawk, but rather a falling instrument of geometry, mathematics, and gravity, with only the faintest resistance of friction separating it from purity: falling faster and faster, as impersonal as death.

Without rushing, he took a warm bath, chatted a while, never mentioning the map, or even geology. Then he walked off into the night, toward town—he'd left the map in the basement, and for a while Mel and Wallis held out hope that he had not believed the map, or had not read it correctly, or had simply flagged in his desire to drill the valley again—but before dusk of the next day, the tractor-trailers came rolling in over the summit, bringing a barge for crossing the river, and construction workers and equipment for building a new road on the other side of the river—a road that would lead them and give them access to the heart of the well.

Amy had limped home that morning, holding her back, saying only that she had slept wrong, and Mel and Wallis were out in the garden, picking beans, when they heard the rumbles of the machines' entry, and felt the vibrations: bulldozers, backhoes, hydraulic drills, and wrenches.

“I didn't think he'd do it,” Wallis said.

“You thought he'd stop with nineteen, and change his mind on twenty?” Mel said.

They went into town to see the spectacle, and when they got there, they found that the hiring was already going on. The foremen were all friendly, smiling.

They weren't in a hurry; they moved slowly. They kept an engine or two running on their diesel rigs, as if to begin lulling and acclimating the villagers to the low purr of the engines.

They almost pretended to be lost—almost, but not quite. They scuffed at the dirt and admired the scenery. They leaned back, crossed their legs, put their hands in their pockets.

“Is anybody here good with a saw?” the foreman asked. “Me, I'm frightened of falling trees.”

“What do you pay?” someone asked, and that was that.

Helen came outside—Wallis and Mel could tell it had been a rough night for her—and she looked as if she were still partly asleep. She went over to a bulldozer and climbed up on one of its huge tires so she could reach up and feel the blade's shiny curved steel. The blade itself was as big as the side of a small house. She touched the rock-dulled teeth of the blade. Each tooth was the size of a man's head. She stroked the teeth—those she could reach—as she would the flank of a wild horse: as if trying to calm it, even change its essence.

Some of the road crew was watching her—she was so tiny—and Wallis and Mel heard the main foreman asking around, casually, “Does anyone need any backhoe work done, while we're up here? We'd be happy to help out. Hell, we came all this way, we might as well. Just don't tell the boss,” he said, and there was a new quickening in the air, a stirring of interests. Each machine was viewed in a new way: in terms of horsepower, in terms of muscle harnessed. A month's work able to be done in a day. No one stepped forward with requests, but all eyes glanced at the waiting machines, evaluating them. A stock tank dammed, a diversion canal dug. A pit for a foundation. A basement, a new septic tank.

“We'll need cooks,” the foreman said, slapping his flat belly. He laughed, then caught Mel's eye, and finished his laugh, his eyes hooding.

Charlie stepped up, raised a tentative hand: a cook. The foreman—the noonday sun caught his short trimmed hair, caught the red filaments in it, and that was how Wallis would think of him, as Red—evaluated Charlie's heft with pleasure. Amy stepped up, also. Red eyed her stomach. Two cooks.

“We don't want the well drilled,” Amy said. “But if you're going to drill it, we should have the jobs.”

A few people glanced in Wallis's direction. He felt sick to his stomach.

There was a wind, up in the tallest trees. It already felt like fall.

A man spoke up from the back of the small, curious crowd—one of the more reclusive residents from the north end of the valley. He would be living within six or seven miles of the construction.

“Whose idea is it to drill on the other side? Is it Old Dudley's?”

Red nodded. “He said one of his geologists worked the prospect up. Said it was a fella who used to live here—his name was Matthew, or something like that.”

Someone laughed. “Another dry hole,” someone said, and Helen turned fiercely to see who had said it.

“Where are you thinking about putting the road?” a woodcutter asked, and everyone saw what he was thinking: that there would be a fifty- or sixty-foot wide swath of piled timber wherever the road went, and that it would be available for firewood.

“Well, I can show you where the old man was talking about,” Red said. He called to one of his helpers, who brought over a map. “Here's roughly where we're thinking about,” Red said, spreading the map out and pausing, then following the river's curve with his finger. Pretending he did not know every contour on the map. Wallis and Mel looked at him and could tell that he would not be content to just blade a path through the forest: that he would want to build a road that would last forever. He'd scrape all the soil away and pack the glacial cobble down with air compressors; he'd blast bedrock, if need be, would carve not just the skin and meat from the earth, but would go deeper, would cut and smash the bones, trying to get to the soft organs beneath.

“I thought we'd go up somewhere along this side,” he said, pointing on the map. “I think somewhere up in here is where the old man and—what's his name?—Matthew—have in mind.” Red fell silent and sat there, holding his hunger: trying not to disappear beneath the hugeness of it.

It didn't have to be roads. It could have been anything. Timber. Love. Money. Meat.

“Oil,” someone said. “Old Dudley and Matthew think there's oil there.”

“Yeah,” said Red. “I don't know.” He shrugged. “I get paid whether it's there or not.” He gestured toward the man who'd just made the connection. “What do you think?” Red asked. “Do you think it's there?”

The man seemed uncomfortable with this responsibility. “Hell,” he said, “I wouldn't know anything about it.” He backed a bit farther into the small crowd.

A small girl spoke up—Suzie, one of the schoolchildren.

“You don't need to be drilling here,” she said angrily. “It's not right. It'll upset the way things are—the way the animals are—their lives, their . . .” She looked around helplessly. “Their
cultures
she said. “Their relationships to the land.” Red smiled, listened patiently.

Wallis thought of Colter.

It was just a four-mile strip, Wallis told himself. Just fifty or sixty feet wide. Suzie turned to her father, who tried to comfort her. There were tears in her eyes.

“I'm sorry,” Red said. “We have a permit. It's public land. I'm just doing my job.”

The herd of people moved in closer, made indecisive by her tears. Some of the boys were beginning to climb up on the giant machines now, sitting in the seats and working the levers.

“You guys are lucky,” Red said, looking around at the forest. His crew wandered over and sat idly next to him. “One day you're just living here, kind of having a hard go of it, and the next day—bing!—we find an oil field for you, and you wake up and your roads are going to be better.” He nodded toward the pay phone. “They'll have to put in phone lines—your phone'll be upgraded—shit, you might even end up with some in your houses—and hell, who knows, before it's all over, you might even have electricity. Building codes,” he said, then chuckled before anyone could take him seriously. “Just kidding about that one. Funds for the school. Oil and gas royalties for the educational system. Computers. Field trips. Stuff like that.”

“Clearcuts for kids,” Belle said, unsmiling.

Suzie turned and began to walk away, her back to them. She started to run.

“A new playground,” Red said, nodding across to the school. “Maybe even better teacher salaries.”

“You came all this way to give us these things,” Belle said.

Red smiled. A bolt of hunger leaping from the pit of his stomach. “No,” he said, “I came here to build a road.”

People stared blankly across the river at the dense forest beyond, unable to see into the future—unable to imagine anything beyond that which they had always known. What was the difference, after all, between nineteen wells and twenty? They began to drift away, save for those who wanted to volunteer for a month's work.

Red began speaking in a more comfortable, less salesman-like voice as Mel and Wallis were leaving—now that the herd, it seemed, had been winnowed down to true believers.

“This fucking stone wall,” he was saying. “Who the fuck built this rock wall?”

 

Another hot day of late August strained past, like a woman giving birth: the sweat streaming down the side of her face, the earth grimacing and shuddering—one more day, the easiest thing in the world—a sunrise and a moonrise—and yet the hardest thing, too.

The apples were falling to the ground, the branches of the tree in the schoolyard bending with their weight. Belle went around picking them up and putting them in baskets to store in the school's root cellar. The south wind would bring fire, which would collide with brief autumn, and then the long winter. The fire had to come.

 

Once they began—once people's hearts had settled so easily back into defeat—the road crew worked quickly. All day and night their saws buzzed as they cut a straight wide line through the wilderness. The diesel engines of the barge growled, sending up ebony plumes of smoke as it ferried men and machines across the river. Iridescent rainbow ribbons of fuel and exhaust drifted downstream, shimmering in the sunlight, and Wallis was glad that the geese were gone, glad that Colter was gone.

The workers lived in a tent-camp by the river, sharing twelve-hour shifts, so that they were continuously gnawing at the road. They shot deer out of season, as if helping themselves to the pantry of the unlocked house of a stranger. They were loud and slovenly and their camp soon took on a stench.

People in the village continued, however, to be unalarmed by the road. It seemed only what it was—a strip, a lane. They could not grasp it as a thing larger than itself.

They swam in the river to escape the maddening heat, and often to go examine the road's progress. Wallis and Mel summoned the courage after a few days to paddle across in a canoe and inspect the finishing stages of the road.

The dust on it was already ankle-deep. The fronds of ferns and cedars on either side were coated with dust. There was the asphaltic smell of diesel everywhere. Mel remembered the last time she had been there, and had smelled the thick scent of a herd of elk. Neither Mel nor Wallis could avoid feeling revulsion at the uprooted stumps, the giant ruined spruce, the huge slash piles of dirt and moss and fern and timber, and yet they were confused by how strangely satisfying they found the beam of light through the darkness: the light-filled tunnel of the road.

They canoed home.

“It's all going to burn anyway,” Wallis said.

The valley was now so primed for fire, so hot and still, that it seemed the simple friction of one's movement against the air—the raising of one's arm, the tilt of a jaw—would be sufficient to set off sparks, which would then ignite the rest.

 

Soon Red had the length of the road cut and was laying in culverts, hauling gravel across on a small barge and sending road graders up and down the lane, compacting gravel over gravel: doing his best to make a road that would last forever. There was only one horse left in the valley, Amy's pony, and he had rented it, and rode it up and down the road, inspecting everything; and sometimes when he was riding hard, the steel hoofs of the pony struck pieces of flint in the gravel and the sparks skittered into the drying grasses and ignited brush fires, which splayed like fingers for short distances into the old forest before extinguishing themselves in the deep mosses and shady rot farther in. Some of the slash piles on the edges of the road were ignited in this manner, and they blinked into life in a trail behind Red's hard rush, the flames crackling sometimes to heights of fifteen and twenty feet.