Where the Sea Used to Be (66 page)

The wind gushed a curtain of gold leaves down past them and onto the ground, the riverside aspen leaves showering the forest floor again, and Wallis paused and stared at their beauty for a moment.

“Hey!”
Old Dudley shouted, “hey,
numb-nuts!”
Wallis jumped back just as a twenty-foot length of chain, thick as a snake, fell from up in the crow's nest and crashed onto the rig floor where he'd been standing. Sparks bounced from where it hit the steel grid of the deck. Wallis remembered—in that half-instant when he'd leapt back—only speed, and force, and the slightest, sickest whisper of sound—the limp chain unfolding only a little, as it fell—and now, seconds later, it lay there totally motionless, totally harmless. Matthew, who had been standing a few steps back, out of harm's way, stepped over to where the chain lay and moved it out of the way.

“Would've tore your head clean off,” Dudley was bellowing. “Would've snapped it off your neck like wet toilet paper. Ninety percent of rig fatalities occur right there where you're standing, numb-nuts—the combat zone, inside that three-foot radius right where you were standing with your head up your ass. Jesus God,” he said, “be careful. You would've made a hell of a mess.”

Wallis said nothing, only looked up at the image of Dudley aloft, silhouetted against the sky, and moved back in and unhooked the pipe tongs. Dudley laughed and released the drilling brake. The diamond bit bounced and shuddered, trying to get a bite on the new rocks far below. There was a horrible caterwauling that resonated throughout the rig's frame, and through the men, a metal against metal sound, as the pipe torqued and spun and bit and fought, settling back to its duty. Dudley revved the throttle. Black smoke coughed into the blue sky, and the pipe's squalling quieted to a steady clattering purr. It would be an hour or so before the first drill cuttings would begin circulating back up on the current of drilling mud, which was cycling back into the mud pit. They would catch the cuttings with a strainer—like netting salmon leaping up the falls, Wallis thought—and examine the cuttings to see what kind of old earth they were piercing, down there. To begin—to continue—putting the story together: as if it were any different from the one going on up above.

The day passed quickly; it melted into work, passed like a muscle's contraction: there was little thinking, only brute effort and rhythmic, mechanical repetition. They stopped working at dusk, weary and sore, Dudley and Matthew unaccustomed to the consequences of physical labor, and as the engines sputtered back down into silence, the quiet came washing in over them as if cleansing them.

Old Dudley slept in the wheelbarrow, exhausted: rode in it as if in a nest, like some enormous fledgling, and he did not wake even as they loaded him into the dory and paddled across in the clearing night crispness, with all the fires on the mountainside visible now, though much reduced, and dying out, with fewer and fewer each night.

Amy would be waiting for him with a lantern on the other shore, with the baby Mary in a little pouch hung around her chest. They would awaken him by splashing water on his face. He would blink slowly, ascending from dreams of nothingness—would blink at the distant mountainside fires and the stars—the woman and her baby standing in the lantern's glow—and the group of them would walk slowly home.

There would be no one waiting for Matthew. Sometimes Wallis and Matthew would go get a beer at the bar, as if trying in some faint way to honor the past, and each other, but more often than not, Matthew would go into the mercantile to get ready for bed and Wallis would go straight home, where Mel would be waiting.

 

They met each morning before daylight in front of the mercantile, and one morning there was a sheet of white cast over the world—not snow yet, but frost; and as the sun rose the frost turned from silver to fractured diamonds: the world melting back into the birthing colors of autumn: red, gold, yellow, blood brown. Dudley had started out in a foul mood, sore and weary, ranting once again at the drilling crew's cowardice, but after they had rowed across the river, and as they began pushing him down the road in the wheelbarrow toward the rig, his mood improved, until he was well on his way to a thing that could almost be called good cheer. It felt to Wallis almost as if they were a family, walking down that leaf-strewn road in the fall, and it felt as if Dudley's mood, the risings and fallings of it, had enough power and force to be cutting or scoring little striations upon the landscape, shaping in some way the face of the earth itself.

Often Matthew worked the crow's nest now while Wallis and Dudley stayed below on the rig floor, fastening pipe and monitoring the drill rate and pump pressure. There was always the danger of drilling into a cavern, which would swallow all the lubricating mud and then twist the pipe. Or the drill bit could strike a pocket of gas, which might blow all the heavy mud—and the flammable gas, in addition to all the steel pipe—back up out of the hole. Anything could happen. There was always a tenseness, a vigilance, up on the rig.

Dudley worked the drilling brake through the soft stretches to keep the pipe from descending too fast—to keep it from twisting and getting stuck. He seemed to Wallis to be inflating with power and happiness as he rode the drilling brake, leaning his whole body against the long-handled lever. It was something someone in a rest home could have done, if they knew how—something subtle but also imprecise, like the occasional flex of a paddle as one rudders a canoe down a small stream—but he was enjoying it, so hopped up and anticipatory—always eager to let the bit down farther—that Wallis believed at any second a trickle of drool might escape his mouth. The rig's throbbings and tremblings shook Dudley around as he leaned the upper half of his body against the drilling brake. It had a safety chain fastened to it to keep the entire pipe string from falling down into the void, should any be encountered.

From time to time Dudley would twist and look up at Matthew, would stare at him impassively a moment or two, but there was nothing that could be shouted over the roar of the rig, and Dudley would just stare, curious as to why such a strong man was unable to endure. Pleased but disappointed both, that he had finally worn him down.

Often Wallis could feel Dudley's eyes on him. For long stretches of time Dudley's hand would be steady on the brake, but then he would bump the throttle up a bit, impatient. Wallis could feel that Dudley was just about to call out another warning—a call for Wallis to pay attention. A mile and a half of rock still separating them from the oil. Old Dudley ignored Matthew and Wallis, now. He shifted his attention to the pressure scale—the great clock-face dial, the red needle leaping and trembling—the slow etch of the geolograph scribbling like an EKG the drill rate below—the brute story of endurance and resistance versus weakness and fatigue—the drill rates transcribing the story of which layers of earth were easy to drill through, and which, more resistant.

Later in the afternoon Dudley put the drilling brake on automatic and took Wallis down to the mud pit to strain for samples. It was far too early to be thinking about oil or gas, but he examined them anyway: rinsed the mud from them, sniffed them, rolled them around in the palm of his hand, looked at them with a hand lens, then put them in his mouth and tasted them, sized them for grain dimensions, clay content, and grittiness, and tried to taste any oil or gas that might be in them.

He gave Wallis a clean handful with which to do the same. It felt to Wallis like taking communion. The sun was level with the trees now and it was orange from the fire's smoke. It seemed strangely as if the sun were descending to the same place they were drilling into. Wallis tasted the grains of rock: tried to taste where they had once lain on the surface, and tried to taste the sunlight that had once shone on them.

 

The shorter the days became, the more beautiful they were. Some days the men stopped working late in the afternoon so that they could walk home in the long light—still pushing Old Dudley in the wheelbarrow—and to give Dudley a rest. Wallis didn't see how the old man could keep going, but he knew that neither could Dudley turn away, and let Mel be even temporarily victorious.

The light passed through the drought-thin leaves of the cottonwoods and aspens as if through yellow parchment, giving a glow of that same color to everything—yellow from the sun and the leaves, gold from the sepia of the smoke.

Dudley's blisters were suppurating from where he had walked and then crawled through the fire. He had new blisters, too, from where he'd been leaning on the brake. His back was hurting him, as were his old knees, but he was happy, as close to peace as he could get.

They always crossed the river before dusk, in the laying-down slant of sunlight: back into the quiet village. A few students were hanging around the school picking apples. Every day, they could see the occasional gray threads of chimney smoke rising through the trees in the unburned, rotting sanctuary along the river, and could smell pies baking: apple and huckleberry. The muffled gurgle of a chain saw could be heard on one of the hills above town, and the ring of axes and mauls, a tiny wooden symphony conducted by the cooling nights. Old Dudley nodded off on the river crossing each day, falling asleep to the sound of river water trickling off the oars, but would awaken again upon reaching the near shore.

Some evenings the three of them would go up the hill to the mercantile to eat supper together. One day a man had killed a doe with his bow and arrow—archery season was open, with rifle season not too distant—and he had her hanging from a tree by the neck and was skinning her. A raven had already found the man—or perhaps followed him in from the woods—and strutted boldly down the road toward him, like a sailor. The three men went over to examine the doe—a clean lung shot —and the man gave them one of the shoulders. He simply folded the shoulder back, made one curved knife stroke along the inside to separate the ligaments that held the shoulder in place, and it was theirs. They put salt, pepper, garlic on the roast and grilled it.

The meal revived Dudley somewhat and he said that he was going to go see his daughter, his new daughter. Matthew said that he was going to bed. The bare shoulderbone gleamed a pearl color, resting on the grill by the side of the fire. Wallis was still strangely hungry: as if no amount of meat could fill him. He could feel not just the length of the nights increasing, but their weight. He could feel his old hunger returning.

 

Matthew was quiet each day as he worked: as if the fires once within him were now only smoldering, slowly gutting him as they would hollow out an old tree. But even as his interior became more brittle, the labor was hardening and chiseling him again, melting his city life from him, so that it gave the illusion that what they were now seeing was his muscular core beneath; that there was no hollowing within.

But Wallis could see it, and Old Dudley could see it. Mel had known it for a long time, but now Wallis was noticing it; and it was becoming, finally, self-evident to Matthew: that the shell of his muscles was returning, like rock armature, but that this time, his endurance and stamina were not. That finally there was nothing beneath the surface. Old Dudley had gotten it all.

With his body chiseled back down to old iron, he grew colder more easily. Several times, late in the afternoons, he would have to take a break and go stand by the warmth of the motor to get himself back up to operating temperature. He would stand there shivering—anxious to get back into the hunt—but knowing that he had to pace himself, that he could not allow himself to get burned down before the oil was reached.

Old Dudley watched him with a thing that was as close to sympathy as he was capable of feeling, and cursed yet again the rig workers who had fled, saying that he could train a gorilla to do what Matthew and Wallis were doing—that Matthew's talents these days were in the office—and finally they had to quit even earlier and go home to warm up and dry out, though Wallis knew Dudley did it to rest the machine as much as Matthew. Some days it was so cold that they breathed clouds with each word.

Dudley was ass-whipped: there was no other word for it. Still, he kept going. But now it was as if he were eating himself, not the world.

 

The children wanted to visit the rig on a field trip, but Mel counseled against it, saying that the roar of the rig might damage their hearing, and the sight of it might damage their spirits. She said her father might say inappropriate things. But the students lobbied her hard, and in the end she saw that they were right—if nothing else, they needed to cross the river to go watch the drilling so that when they were older, they could help bear testimony to the before and after of a place—though Mel also understood as well as anyone that the before and after of things was always a moving target, slightly different with each day's sunrise.

They made a picnic of it. They crossed the river in canoes and life jackets. They ran eagerly up the road toward the sound of the rig. Wallis took them on a tour of the giant machinery, while Dudley and Matthew kept working. Old Dudley eyed the larger children as if evaluating them for labor.

“How deep is it?” a boy wanted to know.

“Eleven thousand feet,” Matthew said, glancing at the dial. “About two-thirds of the way there. But it gets hard, from here on. It gets real hard.”

They could feel in their bones the caterwauling of the bit as it jumped up and down, torquing, trying to scratch its way through denser, older rock. What they were looking for, Wallis told them, was new rock beneath the old rock. They were looking for a place where the layers of earth had been swirled, bent, folded, and flexed back on themselves, so as to provide layers of repetition. The rig would in essence keep drilling through the same formations, again and again, but at greater depths each time, until finally, near the bottom, they would find younger rocks trapped far beneath the older rocks—as if youth were tucked below age, far beneath the curl of a towering wave.