Where the Sea Used to Be Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  BOOK ONE

  BOOK TWO

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  First Mariner Books edition 1999

  Copyright © 1998 by Rick Bass

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Bass, Rick, date.

  Where the sea used to be / Rick Bass,

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-395-77015-7

  ISBN 0-395-95781-8 (pbk.)

  I. Title

  PS3552.A8213W47 1998

  813'.54—dc21 98-12842 CIP

  eISBN 978-0-544-34157-9

  v1.0514

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The author wishes to acknowledge the use of various entries from Alexander Winchell’s 1886 Walks and Talks in the Geological Field, from which many of the “lectures” in this book were adapted. The author is also grateful to have quoted from Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux, by John G. Neihardt

  The photographs on the title and part-title pages are by Stuart D. Klipper

  For my editors—

  Harry Foster,

  Dorothy Henderson,

  and Camille Hykes

  The Wolverine, Carcajou, or Glutton

  This Species of animals is very numerous in the Rocky Mountains and very mischievous and annoying to Hunters. They often get into the traps setting for Beaver or searching out the deposits of meat which the weary hunter has made during a toilsome days hunt among mountains too rugged and remote for him to bear the reward of his labors to the place of Encampment, and when finding these deposits the Carcajou carries off all or as much of the contents as he is able secreting it in different places among the snow rocks or bushes in such a manner that it is very difficult for man or beast to find it. The avaricious disposition of this animal has given rise to the name of Glutton by Naturalists who suppose that it devours so much at a time as to render it stupid and incapable of moving or running about but I have never seen an instance of this Kind on the contrary I have seen them quite expert and nimble immediately after having carreyd away 4 or 5 times their weight in meat. I have good reason to believe that the Carcajou’s appetite is easily satisfied upon meat freshly killed but after it becomes putrid it may become more Voracious but I never saw one myself or a person who had seen one in a stupid dormant state caused by Gluttony altho I have often wished it were the case . . .

  —Osborne Russell, Journal of a Trapper, 1854–1843

  BOOK ONE

  HE HAD BEEN EATING THE WHOLE WORLD FOR THE SEVENTY years of his life; and for the last twenty, he had been trying to eat the valley. It was where he, Old Dudley, sent his young men to look for the oil he told them he was sure was there, but which they had never found.

  He preferred to chew through his geologists one at a time, so that he could focus the brunt of his force upon them without dilution. In his fifty years of searching for oil and gas, he had burned out over a dozen good geologists, burning them to a crisp like an autumn-dry piece of grass lit by a match, though other times crushing them to dust by manipulating their own desires against them: by allowing them full access to their urge to search the earth below.

  He allowed them to drill wherever they wanted, and as often as they wished; and after they had burned to ash or been crushed to dust, it was as if the wind blew even those traces away. He never saw them again. And he would go out hunting for a new geologist to train, teach, and control.

  Old Dudley avoided searching for them in the schools. In Dudley’s mind, by the time a geologist had been through a university, he or she was ruined. And he chose only young men, knowing full well that the women would be harder to crush—more enduring, and able to outlast him. Dudley knew also that his own brittleness within—the tautness of his aged but still-intact libidinal desires—would end up burning or crushing him, rather than the other way around. He knew that with a woman geologist, he would be creeping around the office, forever wanting to crawl under her table as she mapped—wanting to sniff beneath her dress, wanting to lick her calves. He would look at a woman geologist and see only sex: he would not, could not, see the universe below.

  So he chose only men, boys, really: eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old, nearing their physical peak, and still operating fully on passion rather than technique or intellect. He had to catch them before someone got to them and taught them to believe in borders and limitations. Once they got that into their heads, it was very hard to coax them into flaming out or smashing themselves to dust. And once they’d been taught or lectured by another, they might question his vision of how it was in the netherworld—the comings and goings of things below.

  He had to get to them first. He had to let them be born into the world and go about their own business of growing up—he couldn’t just put them in a pen and farm them, nor did he exactly go cruising the streets at night looking for young men about to ignite—but he was always alert, ever aware of the possibility of encountering such a recruit.

  Old Dudley could tell in a glance whether one of them had those coals within. He could see it in the shape of the young man’s shoulders and in his posture. He could smell it, and he could see it in the young man’s eyes. He could gauge it in every manner—sensing the internal temperatures and possibilities and heat of that young man as if holding his hands in front of a campfire to warm them.

  It was never a blind allegiance that Dudley was looking for—that would have made it too easy, and in the end that geologist would never be able to become any better than Old Dudley himself. Old Dudley was more sporting than that. The best, the absolute best, was when the geologist, after a long time, came to understand Dudley for the monster he was—the manipulator, the domineer—but also understood that it was too late to turn back, that only with Old Dudley could the geologist keep drilling his wells when and where and however he wished—as long as they were not dry holes.

  That was when the geologist finally began to crumble, or to smolder: when he became aware of the trap Dudley had laid for him from the beginning.

  It was very strange. This was also when Dudley began to take pity on his geologist, and even feel love for him, or a thing as close to love as he could achieve.

  The struggle of the geologist between his two masters—the young geologist’s bondage to Old Dudley’s horrific nature, and the young geologist’s pure desire to reach, again and again, those craggy lands below—so unattainable, possibly even invisible, to other geologists, as to perhaps seem maddening to the seer who knew of them—reminded Old Dudley of some model of the very workings that so fascinated him: the earth’s volcanic strainings and belchings, as one continental plate drifted over another like massive fire-breathing animals procreating: fissures and clefts channeling magma to the surface and giving birth to islands, new stone, then soil, then life.

  Huge chunks of continent were forever falling back into the magma and lava—melting back into the mixture, caught and shredded between the gearworks far below, with the earth’s brute physical desires at the center; mountains rising only to be sanded down in the blink of an eye, to then b
e redistributed in layers of wind-whipped sediment on the other side of the globe, even as new mountains were swelling like waves at sea rising to loom over and then crash down onto those earlier sediments, leaving no trace, not even a memory . . .

  To go down into that battleground and find the oil—to travel into those lands—to avoid being crushed by those falling mountains, or drowned within those swamps and seas—this was as close to love as Dudley could get, and once his geologist found himself imprisoned by the knowledge that Dudley was his master—that was when Dudley felt a small warmth, and sorrow.

  The sorrow fulfilled a space and a need within him. It helped him achieve his fit in the world. Perhaps it helped keep the gearworks, and perhaps the world itself, turning. The sorrow, however, was insignificant to the warmth Dudley felt watching the geologist flee deeper into those subterranean lands—the geologist trying, in that manner, to escape his bondage to Old Dudley, and in so doing, bruising himself against those rocks.

  Whereas before in the young geologist there had been the grace of innocence, an absence of self-knowledge, there were now sparks of friction as the geologist tumbled among those gearworks like a falling bird with an injured wing.

  Old Dudley was not a pleasant man to look at. Though ancient, he appeared to be no older than his early sixties, and he had the build of an ex-athlete who had labored to keep himself firm and steady. His eyes were a shade of gray that somehow—whether he wished this or not—gave others the illusion of deceit. His thinning hair, cut close, was silver. He carried, at all times, an air of roughness, no matter how dapper his dress. Something about the build of his frame—his musculature, his stance and carriage—made it easier to imagine him doing some physical violence to someone—swinging a wooden club—than being sedate and civil. The disparity between his fine dress and the awkwardness of his posture only made him seem more unpredictable—as if he were trapped, and as such, always within only a stone’s throw of rage or harm-making.

  Further unsettling, to anyone who knew the specifics, was his nearly immeasurable wealth—the hundreds of oil and gas fields that he had discovered, lying at varying depths all around the country: billions of dollars of reserves.

  More troubling still was the fact that he capitalized very little on his great riches; whatever money was gained from the production of his oil and gas fields went always and unceasingly into the drilling of more, so that his operation was always expanding, oil flowing up his discovery wells to fuel the downward drilling of new wells elsewhere. The effect was that of a relentless sewing machine; but instead of stitching anything back together, he was forever piercing the earth, jabbing more holes into it, so that his company was more like some sharp-toothed beast eating the world, the lower jaws forever rising and gulping, the upper jaws simultaneously clamping down; and growing ever larger as it fed.

  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 cru
mbling 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.