Where the Sea Used to Be (23 page)

Up on the mountain behind them, the wolves began to answer. “Holy shit, let's get inside quick,” Dudley said, crawling back inside. “Lock that door,” he ordered. He resumed his creeping. “Do you think they'll get that salamander-boy?” he asked.

Wallis didn't answer, but instead prepared an elk-hide pallet by the fire. He turned out the lamps, exhausted. He could feel the earth below him spinning in one rhythm, and at one speed—
winter
—while he above was moving much faster, in step with neither the time of year nor the place.

Old Dudley kept creeping. Wallis could tell where he was by the sounds of his huffing and puffing, and by the way the floor would creak whenever Dudley passed by, and by the damp, dank odor of him, like mushrooms in a shady forest—and after a while, he heard Dudley collapse in a heap at the base of the couch, then heard him climb up onto the couch, where there was the rustling of hides and blankets as he covered himself for sleep, like some creature crawling back into its burrow: though even then, in the quietness, there was still the rankness, the odor of him, which kept blossoming from him as he slept, like some flower blooming in the night. Wallis's last thought was of how someone as precise and understated—as
watchful
—as Mel could have come directly out of such a rutting old boar as Dudley.

 

Dudley was staring at Wallis when he awoke. It was daylight, midmorning, and still snowing, and he was standing a few feet away, just watching him. The fire had gone out and the cabin was cold. The blossoming odor was gone.

“Listen,” Dudley said, and pointed down the hall. “Do you think they're
coupled?”
he asked. “Do you think they're hooked up?”

“I'd rather not—” Wallis started to say, but then the sounds began, the sounds that had awakened Dudley. “
Listen
,” Dudley said. He crouched a bit, as one might crouch in the woods, listening to the approach of a deer. “Does it sound like mouth-fucking to you?” he asked. He started to say something else, something unguarded, but stopped and eyed Wallis differently.

“You're vile,” Wallis said.

“Well, yes,” Dudley said. “America is vile. These are vile, hungry times. People are hungry for my oil and gas without even knowing they're hungry for it. And you work for me, and you find it, so you're vile, too. We're all vile.” He sat down, his feelings clearly hurt.

“Don't tell me you haven't been with her yourself,” he said. “I can
smell
it on you.”

Wallis went into the kitchen and busied himself lighting the wood stove.

Old Dudley followed him. “You've been with her, right?”

“No,” Wallis said.

The headboard was bumping against the wall of the cabin now. Dudley grinned hugely.

“You're different than you were in Houston,” Wallis said, and Dudley shook his head.

“I'm different from how you chose to view me,” he said. “You just weren't seeing clearly. You didn't want to see. Anyway,” he said, “how I am has nothing to do with below, does it?”

“No,” Wallis admitted, “not really.”

There were more rustlings in the bedroom.

“You wouldn't know where I can get me some, would you?” Dudley asked. Wallis pretended not to know what he was talking about. “No, I don't guess you would,” he said. He left the kitchen then, as if to be alone in his disappointment, or as if Wallis's prudery were contagious. He went to the fireplace and tried to get a fire going. Wallis began mixing pancake batter, and watched him. He was doing it all wrong—stacking green chunky logs on top of each other without any kindling, and without any air, and he kept lighting matches and holding them against the big chunks of wood until the matches burned down. He singed his fingers and he cursed and flapped his hands, then tried again.

Dudley continued to curse, and, finally admitting failure, came back into the kitchen, where he moved in close to the wood stove. He proceeded to tell Wallis all of the things he intended to do when next he did find someone.

Now the sounds from the bedroom were coming in a different rhythm. Old Dudley cocked his head like the RCA dog and ventured back into the other room, to better formulate a theory—and Wallis wanted space, more space from this craziness, or if it wasn't craziness, from this hunger.

The sounds stopped, then—the musical rumba of the bed frame having finished things off—and Old Dudley leered at Wallis. He said, “Sometimes I forget he's not my son—sometimes he seems more my son than she does my daughter.”

Though the odor of Dudley's creeping from the night before was gone, Wallis needed fresh air. He went down to the creek to haul water to heat for baths. When he came back, Mel and Matthew had joined Dudley at the table and things were calmer. Mel seemed willing, always willing, to give Dudley another chance—and as if playing cat-and-mouse, Dudley was willing to take it. It seemed to Wallis that if she were going to disown him, surely she would have done so by now.

She was wearing an old white terrycloth robe, her hair was brushed, and she was smiling. Wallis saw for the first time that she was not simply attractive, but beautiful, and marveled that in the depth of his funk or numbness he had missed it, after a month of living with her.

She thanked him for bringing the water in and began making pancakes for breakfast. Wallis went out for more water, again and again. Old Dudley and Matthew sat at the table and talked about oil and gas. Wallis wanted to listen—was crazy to listen, after so long a silence, a separation from it—but the water needed to be hauled. He wore his path deeper and deeper—a rut, a tunnel—with each passage. He wondered how many trips Matthew had made up and down this same path. He wondered where it had all gone: all the water Matthew had hauled, all the trails cut deep into the snow and ice, and all the love he'd had for Mel.

When he brought the last of the water in, everyone was seated at the table. Matthew and Mel were waiting for him to join them; Old Dudley had forged ahead, had spread maple syrup and huckleberry jam thick across his pancakes and was chowing down, making the most awful smacking noises. Matthew and Mel were holding hands but Wallis knew that there remained between them only the thinnest threads of a bond, that it was only an echo of what once had been.

As if reading this thought, Old Dudley finished one pancake, paused for a swig of milk (into which he'd poured a dollop of rum), and said to Wallis, “You've got to dive, boy—I'm telling you, you're going to jack around up here at the surface and get stranded—you've got to turn loose of, and ignore, all this bullshit.” Dudley waved his hands at everything in the cabin—the books, the antlers, the fireplace, and lastly, Mel.

Mel stared at him for a moment but said nothing, having decided to let him stew in his own vapors. She would try to salvage what she could of the day and ignore him, though she knew that after a while it would be like trying to ignore a dog turd in the middle of the floor.

There was a tapping at the window: a small face appeared, cuphanded, and they thought it was Colter again, but saw then that it was Helen.

“Aww, shit,” Matthew said, “are her feelings going to be hurt, or what?” He got up and hurried to the door to let her in. He hugged her and said, “Merry Christmas, Ma.” She was holding an armload of wrapped presents—small, bright boxes she'd brought over in her pack—and she smiled uncertainly and stepped in, confused by the sight of a table-setting that did not include her. Mel jumped up and fixed a plate for her, poured her a cup of coffee in her one good china cup.

“I got up and looked out my window and saw the two of you drive through town,” she said. “In that long black car, gliding across the snow. I thought it was a dream and I went back to sleep. But in the morning I saw the tracks. I waited for a while, thinking you'd be coming over for breakfast, but then I came on over. I saw where the car went through the snow. I guess that's why y'all couldn't get back over to the mercantile,” she said, though she knew full well that Matthew, even the city-husk of him, could have skied or snowshoed back to town easily.

“We were just about to head over there,” Matthew said. “Right after we finished breakfast, and right after we took our baths.”

The silence following any lie, or half-truth.

“Here,” Helen said, handing them each a gift. “Merry Christmas.”

“Oh, Helen,” Mel said, “you do this every year, and we ask you not to. We didn't get anything for anyone. We just eat, and visit, and hang out . . .

“I don't want anything,” Helen said. “I just wanted to give y'all a little something. If it's that uncomfortable for you, next year I can bring them over the day before Christmas, or the day after. But it makes me happy. You don't have to give me anything. Please open them.”

They peeled off the hand-painted wrapping paper. Four tiny deer hide pouches, soft and thin, and smelling of wood smoke. Wallis's eyes stung with the pleasure of being included. They opened their drawstring pouches—each small enough to be held in the palm of a hand.

A river stone, smooth and polished as an agate, for Wallis.

A handful of porcupine quills for Mel, beautiful as ivory, each one nearly weightless and perfect for the duty for which it had been crafted: defense.

An eagle's talon, gnarled and dried but razor-sharp, for Old Dudley.

An old silver pocketwatch for Matthew. He held it, studied it, wanting to know—he looked inquiringly at Helen—and she said, “Yes, I
think
so.”

Matthew held it to his face to smell the odor of it—tarnished silver, ancient silver—and to glean the echoes of any memories that might be emanating from it.

“I think so too,” said Matthew. “How did you find it?”

“Amy found it, when she was going through some of Zeke's things,” Helen said. “She remembered that Zeke's father used to hang out with your father a lot, when they were younger—they used to go bird hunting together a lot—and after Buster died, the watch must have somehow gone to Zeke's father, and after that, to Zeke. I guess after that it would have gone to Colter,” Helen said. “It was awfully sweet of Amy to think of it.”

“Amy,” said Old Dudley, fingering the tips of the eagle's claws: the ankle as bright a yellow as an ear of corn. “She's the one with the nice bumcakes, right?”

They ignored him. Matthew pressed the smoothness of the watch to his face, and closed his eyes for a moment.

“It doesn't work anymore, of course,” Helen said. “But maybe you could get it fixed somewhere.”

Matthew opened his eyes, but she saw that he was not seeing her, or anyone, or anything. Helen wondered if after she was gone, he would ever hold anything of hers that tightly to him.

A thing like a scar, a crescent of pain, ran through her center, from her waist and across her chest. She flinched at the tightness of it—the illogical pain of sorrow amidst joy—and tried to relax, tried to tell herself that it didn't matter; that the good fortune was hers for having known and loved him, for having been able to raise him in his parents' stead. The fact that she might be forgotten, dust, the moment she stepped off the earth, did not matter.

Mel got up and hugged Helen, thanking her again. Old Dudley made a childish, clawing motion at the air with his eagle talon, of which he was clearly proud. “I'd get up and thank you,” he said, “but I've got a king-sized boner, thinking about Amy. You wouldn't want to see it. It would shock and amaze you,” he said.

“Thank you,” Helen said. “Please stay seated.”

Wallis fingered his river stone: worn and abraded smooth. It fit the palm of his hand, and the space below his ear, where his jaw hinged. He pressed it here and there, as Matthew had done with his father's watch, and said thank you to Helen.

“Let me see that old thing,” Dudley said to Matthew, reaching across the table for the watch. Matthew handed it to him. “Careful,” Matthew said, as if speaking to a child—but Old Dudley was reckless with it, opening the lid and shaking it and holding it to his ear, then shaking it again, rough as a primate. The watch slipped from his hands.

Wallis had been watching, anticipating; he dived for the falling watch, lunged from his chair, and caught it in one hand just before it hit the ground, while the rest of them sat petrified, waiting to hear the sound of its breaking. There was a nauseating silence, as all their adrenaline resettled, and Old Dudley chuckled, a
heh-heh
kind of chuckle, and said, “Good catch.” Wallis handed the watch back to Matthew.

 

They went into town that afternoon, after they had all bathed, taking turns in only six inches of hot water in the big tub, changing the water each time; and when they went out on their skis, their hair was still damp, and it froze around their skulls like helmets, and their skin contracted, stretched tighter to take the wrinkles and crow's-feet from their faces, and made them all feel younger as they skied. They skied in single file, and when they passed the limousine they saw that it had sunk a little farther, as the temperatures had warmed slightly.

The breeze was at their backs now, from the south, and to the south they could see a high wall of purple clouds, another snowstorm coming in, squeezing in again over the same pass through which such storms had passed for thousands of years—coming through the notch of Gunsight Mountain—and then being channeled along the river, flanked between the high mountains on either side. Dumping snow every time as if to bury the valley, either because it was too beautiful to be seen by the world, or as if in punishment for some evil long-forgotten. Always the storms took the same path.

When they got to town, the Red Dog was full, overflowing; despite the cold, the door was open, and people lounged on the porch dressed in heavy quilted coveralls and wrapped in fur robes. Heat from the stove trickled out the door for a short distance like spilled water. A few horses were tied to the porch rail, where they stood with heads down, snow-matted, dreaming of, hungering toward, their next feeding of hay, while other horses wandered loose and milled around the porch, even took the first few tentative steps up onto it—feeling that warm air from the open door trickling around their ankles—and it seemed that they were considering going into the bar, and it seemed also from the degree of inebriation of those on the porch that the horses might be welcome to do so.