Lost Everything (11 page)

But now the park was gone, the houses blanched and streaked with mud. On the dirty slope down to the water, in the lawns and in the streets all the way up the hill, a vast camp of hovels had been banged together from parts of cars and fences, tents of stained bed sheets sagging after days of rain. Encampments with no shelter at all. And people everywhere, thousands of them. A family of thirteen, six adults and seven children, huddled around a scrap pile. People sitting, standing, their heads down, bony fingers clasped in their laps. All with the same expression of stunned lethargy. In the air, the tang of rancid food and burning plastic, from dozens of fires that fogged the air with a blue-gray miasma. Murmuring voices, the weakening cries of children. Low wails whenever someone died of starvation, of dysentery, of pneumonia. It seemed to be happening every second, a life loosed from the flesh, the grieving survivors. They had seen it coming, but were still in shock. Did not know what to do with the bodies. Looked around at the town being killed. The trees among them stripped to poles, to stumps. The yards uprooted, the buildings peeled to their skeletons. Millersburg would not survive much longer this way, but it was not the refugees’ fault. They had nowhere else to be. The war had driven them here. They had fled from it like animals before a forest fire. Left behind everything they could not wear, everyone they could not carry. They had lived like this for weeks, for months, their own bodies eating them alive. In a week, the war, moving with purpose up the river valley, would reach them at last, its hand falling upon them, and there would be a massacre. For what reason, none of them would ever know. They understood that the bullets that would take them were not far away—just a few miles south. They just couldn’t run anymore.

As the
Carthage
drew close to the shore, they all raised their heads, stared at the people on the ship as one, all those faces and all that they had seen. Remember us, that we got this far. That we were still breathing when you saw us, though we did not get a chance to speak. Elise, the braided woman, stood at the
Carthage
’s rail, hands white around the smoothed wood. Up on tiptoes, scanning the shore. Her anxious brain making everyone on land familiar. Lost cousins, sisters she had not seen since childhood. Friends she had last seen eleven years ago, when she was sixteen, sitting in a car in February, the windows rolled up against a warm rain. The wipers screeching across the windshield. The vinyl sweating beneath her. Her boyfriend next to her in the car, saying Elise, you couldn’t be any prettier. The headlights slicing a gleaming gash of a wet field from the darkness, dead stalks of corn snapped off at calf height. Her friends running toward her, clothes soaking, arms pinwheeling through the growing storm, as though they were on fire.

Elise grew up in Elmira, New York, but when she was seventeen, she fled south to Shickshinny, seventy-five miles north of Millersburg. Shickshinny huddled in a hollow among five peaks, houses scrambling up the steep hills along narrow streets not meant for cars. Stopping at walls of stone, the sheared toes of the mountains. She spent part of her pregnancy in a stolen car at the moldering remains of what used to be a gas station just north of town. The girl at the counter was fighting through the bulletproof glass with a man in a stained white T-shirt. Four people stood by a crate of overripe vegetables, watching, unmoving, one of them thinking he would break it up if it got too bad, one of them hoping it would get worse. A half a mile later she had the car on the shoulder, her door open, and she was vomiting into the gravel and crying. It was all catching up to her. Seven cars coughed by, a cart pulled by three horses. None of them slowed down. The ninth vehicle stopped, a green pickup too old to be running. A man with long stringy hair, a baseball cap, his beard tied with slim ribbons into four tails. An extended hand.

“Looks like you need somewhere to be.”

“I’m pregnant,” she said.

“I noticed. What’s the name?”

“Elise.”

“That your name or its name?”

“You a pervert?”

“No. No, just curious,” he said.

“That’s my name,” she said.

“Pleased to meet you, Elise.” He smiled. “Monkey Wrench.”

“That’s not your real name, is it?”

“Might as well be, around here. Come on.”

They left her car to die. He siphoned off the oil, put her in the passenger seat of the truck, and started driving. She understood then that she had been hallucinating for fifty miles. The road swimming out from under a collapsing sky. The steering wheel going soft in her hands, turning to wet clay. The fetus singing to her in a language she could not comprehend, all the way down Route 11 out of New York and into Pennsylvania, following the road as the road followed the river, the nerves along the spine. The last dozen miles, through Shickshinny and farther south, she remembered later only as a blur of gray and pale yellow, except for Monkey Wrench, who was in sharp focus. No. Just his hands. The right one on the wheel, the left hanging relaxed from his wrist, his elbow out the window. The hands were huge, knotted with veins, bolts of muscle and tendon. The web of creases and pores rubbed with dirt, turning his skin into tiny scales. A thin mat of fine dark hair from the cuff of his shirt to his knuckles. The tail of a tattoo that slept on his arm. Giant calluses on his fingertips. She thought he must work construction. Realized later it was small engines and the string bass, though he always joked he never could tell them apart. She fell asleep in the truck and Monkey Wrench carried her inside, lay her down on a mattress next to the stage. Put blankets on her and went outside, as quiet as he could. Told everyone else to shut the fuck up when they got back home.

Elise slept for a long time, longer than she had since her pregnancy had begun. Since she had met the father, just a boy himself. The afternoon after, her parents’ anger. Alcohol stinging her face, her throat. All that felt like ages ago when she first woke up in the West Side Ballroom, just north of Berwick, as if another girl had died at the state border and she had inherited her soul and her child. It was not quite light out, and she could see nothing. Her hands moved across her belly, pushed down. There. The pressure of a foot, pushing back.

The sun crept into a tiny window and across a flat of bare red carpet. Others were sleeping like hills in the distance. Metal chairs with mottled vinyl cushions, stacked in towers. Folded card tables leaning against the wall. A stage of plywood risers. Bad speakers. Four spotlights, the ends wrapped in colored cellophane. The fetus kicked and Elise shifted, itched. The blankets she was wrapped in were scratchy, but warmed her. She saw that two people were sleeping on the bare floor in just their clothes, that the blankets were theirs. Understood that this was her family, the one that she had always been trying to find, though they had not yet spoken a word to each other.

In the next four months, before she gave birth, she got to know them all, the inhabitants of the West Side Ballroom, as it was called on the sign hanging off the building’s front. The letters punched out of metal, tin silhouettes of instruments—shadow puppets of fiddles, guitars, and banjos—swinging below them. The building had a curling metal roof, looking more like a barn than a dance hall. The days and nights were filled with music and scavenging. Plucking weeds and boiling them for hours to make them edible. Seeing what the river might bring. A fat smallmouth that they salted and boiled whole, making chowder. A string of catfish. Sometimes ducks. They put on shows to get the rest. Little gigs on the risers that people came from a few towns over to hear, bringing potatoes and carrots, leeks pale and slender. A giant zucchini, grown for sustenance, not flavor. They boiled all of it, fed everyone. A small miracle every twelve hours: to always have enough, just because they believed they would.

Elise’s son was born in the parking lot outside, beneath the birdhouses perched on stilts. The house band playing under six torches, while teenagers danced and five men got in a fight over a motorcycle. Her new tribe all around her, holding her back and shoulders, stroking her hair. Strong hands on her feet, calves, and knees every time she pushed. They put the boy to her naked breast the moment he was born, and he squirmed and screamed. She swooned so hard her breath left her. She had never been so in love, knew even then that she never would be again, except perhaps for her other children. Her heart grew larger for them already, but they never came. Never would, now.

Andre was eight when the war began. First it was a rumor, of floods, fires. A beast that ate men. It was east of them. It was south. Three buses trolled Route 11 shouting for recruits. Promised paychecks, a new pair of shoes. An officer with gold on his cap gave a speech on the steps of the marble bank building, in the shadow of the mountain. The people at the West Side Ballroom did not go to war. They saw enough of it in the people who came back to Shickshinny. Bandages covering half of someone’s face. A man with no legs struggling by in a wheelchair built from the sawed-off end of a church pew and three bicycle tires. Others were bodily whole, but their minds were scrambled. Monkey Wrench broke up a fight between three of them at four in the morning, in the middle of the road that ran down to the fields by the river. Talked about it after the sun came up, shaking his head. Those men didn’t fight like people, he said. They were snarling and howling, lunging, rolling, flipping on the pavement. Nails and teeth. After he separated them, they would not speak, just hacked and spat at each other from either side of the road. Monkey Wrench stood in the street with his big hands out, looking to one side, then the other. Trying to hold the town together by keeping them apart.

But the war was spreading. Recruiting turned to drafting. Taking the men younger and younger. Nothing but legal kidnapping, a woman said. The coal companies all over again. Throwing the children into the black pit. It made the town mean. At the West Side Ballroom shows, there were more fights than parties. At last, a killing. In the morning, a dead man curled around the post of the Zephyr Plaza sign. They buried him on the other side of the tracks, far enough down that the river might take him, carry him to the sea. Then they stood around the grave and argued, half for staying, half for going, away from the war. They could turn their back on it, the second half said, live as if it had never begun. And besides, Elise said, there is no way they can have my boy. Ever.

Monkey Wrench, who would never leave Shickshinny, smiled. Let the other half go, as long as they promised to come back before it was over.

“We promise,” they said, and meant it. For the bond they shared seemed to be stronger than the fighting all around them. It could abide. The fires would pass, and then they would return, as if nothing had happened to anyone, and they had been gone no more than a day, maybe three.

Andre was thirteen now. Skin, hair, clothes all the same tawny color, steeped in sun and river. He could remember the West Side Ballroom, the birdhouses, the cracks in the asphalt. Monkey Wrench throwing him in the air, his wide smile. The closest he had ever had to a father. He could recall, too, the string of houses and parties after they left. Then his first girlfriend, on the ladder of a water tower in Maryland. Her pink polyester shirt. Her hand on his bare shoulder, wet with dew and nervousness. He told people he was from Pennsylvania—or all over, he would say, tilting his head, sweeping his hand, taking in the world. But they had been on the
Carthage
long enough that Elise knew that the ship was the land that made him, the wooden planks from bow to stern the plains of his native country.

Elise looked at the refugees along the shore of Millersburg again. A man shambling through the mud, eyes pushed into his skull, skin stretched over his cheeks. Five children beating on each other, too hard to be play. She thought of the parents she ran from, the war all around them. They were sailing through it all as if they were ghosts already. As if they could reach the edge of the world, glide off into emptiness through a thick morning fog. The boat floating on nothing and everyone on board still together, music and violence and all.

Her son came up on deck, shirt off, shorts hanging off his hips. A swagger that had come with the first blond shadow of a mustache. He took a long look at what Millersburg had become and seemed to Elise, to accept it at once. He was better at that than she was, Elise thought. Tough in a way she would never be, so natural, so nonchalant it could be mistaken for gentleness. It made her so proud of him, so angry at everything else.

“How long are we here for?” he said.

“Tomorrow,” she said. “Maybe two days more. Shickshinny’s not far now.”

“Are you sure we have to go?” There was a girl, the mother knew. One of his friends meant more to him than her now. She could not say when that had started. A few weeks ago, maybe. They were still trying to keep it secret, but she had seen them together. Knew what was happening inside her son, his life before discovering that girl already falling far away from him, the world receding. It was insanity at that age, the mother thought. A flash flood, a typhoon, dragging you out into the squall of the storm. It would drown you if you let it. It was impossible to imagine anything stronger. Until you had your first child.

She did not answer him, and he turned to the river. The ferry squatting in mid-current, still more than a half mile off.

“I’m going swimming,” he said.

“Andre?” she said. “Are you sure it’s safe?” But he was already crossing the deck, leaping over the rail with a whoop and letting out a caterwaul that lasted all the way into the water, legs moving as if pumping a bicycle. Six other kids were in the river already, splashing and taunting, kids from the camp on the shore, who would be dead within a week. They swam out of the river’s current until the water was only up to their waists. The lighter ones mounting the heavier ones’ shoulders, pairing off to conduct chicken fights.

She had protected him for so long. Saying, don’t eat that. Get away from there. Had leveled guns four times at other human beings in service to him. Never had to shoot because the target could tell how serious she was. All to ensure that the boy would live, for the war could not last forever and he was young. He had decades to only half remember what he had seen, to bury it under years of peace. To have children of his own. But the night she heard about the Big One, she gave him a shot of whiskey. Let him smoke dirty cigarettes with the pilot. Turned away when she saw him approaching the revelers sitting in a circle on the deck, passing a pipe. For a few days, he was a dog that did not realize its leash had been taken off, moved as if he were still wearing it, walking to what used to be the end of its length and stopping. Then he put his foot out, saw that there was nothing holding him back, and started running. Now she could always find him in the throng in the theater before dawn. Passed out under the roof of the captain’s quarters, feet hanging out in the rain. The best week of his life, he said, and she seethed with anger. It was supposed to be better than this. She promised her son then that she would do something about that.