Lost Everything (16 page)

So we stood in the parking lot in Rainelle, the boy coloring the asphalt with house paint from a rusting can he’d found in the next shop over. And why did you come back here? I said. She looked toward the north, then back at the boy, who did not look up. I don’t know what’s coming, she said. But at least I know where I am.

*   *   *

ONCE, THE CONFLUENCE OF
the west and north branches of the Susquehanna was choked with infrastructure. High floodwalls imprisoning the river, imprisoning the towns that grew up when they found coal and were left for dead when the coal was gone. A web of bridges. Dams for the ferry, for the power station, to create a lake in the summer, broad and shallow, for boats and swimmers. The river huge and serene, its push against metal and stone so quiet that it was easy to forget it was there until it took a child, a dog, from one of those places where it had been diverted and forced to show its strength. The towns faded behind the walls. The power station struggled to stay open, gave up with a final sigh. The four smokestacks on the eastern shore still rose high over the trees, but were leaning askew. Waiting for the Big One to knock them over. The electric lines hanging in a long curve over the water held out for much longer than anyone thought, long after the power was turned off, but at last, on the tail of a brittle winter, they snapped with a whipping yelp. That was the river’s signal, but it did not hurry. It went over the dams and carried pieces of them off—not enough to pull everything down, but enough to flood the towns, taste the land, and recede, leaving marks on buildings, fences, telephone poles, to show where it had been. Would be again.

It was past midnight when the
Carthage
rode by Sunbury during a break in the rain, the moon through the clouds throwing gray light on black water. The crew on watch saw that the wall there had broken, the river spilling through the breach, covering the houses along the frontage road up to their knees. The water stretched across the town, turning each house into an unstable island. There were torches lit on chimneys, making sparking reflections in the water. In the glow of the fires they could see a couch resting on sheets of plywood propped up by lengths of pipe, erecting a stage across the roof. A blue tarp on poles, stretched over the couch to keep the rain off. Laundry suspended from house to house. On a tall tan garret, a bucket on a winch, half-lowered and pushed by the wind into a slow swing, tapping against the vinyl siding. Signs of lives lived outside, though not of the people who lived them. Everything silent, while on the ship, there was so much noise. The deck of the
Carthage
was packed with cries and hollers, people haggling under the lanterns, the rising whoops of young men who were getting drunk too fast, the edge in their voices of wanting to start something bloody. Wanting the kind of night they would wake up from with teeth missing. In the theater below, the band had started early, struck up a lilting, relentless rumba. The bass and drums laying down a beat that forced hips to move. Twin guitars climbing a rope of sunny notes that the singer set to swinging. Trying to ward off bloodshed. Feet tapping, legs bent, backs arched, hands in the air. They shouted and yelped when the music asked for it, and it gave them ripples of ringing arpeggios, splashes of percussion, in return. The sweating walls sent the groove through the hull of the boat, into the water, to vibrate against the banks. For a small hour, there were no couples, just a mass of humans moving together, letting everything in. The brushes with another’s skin. The tang in the air from a million breaths. Smoke rolling across the ceiling from sputtering lanterns. The grainy ferment of shared beer. Each person believing that what they were feeling could spread across the ship, turn the knives outside to steam, then carry them where no bullets flew and no bodies failed, and it would not matter if the earth and sky left, for they no longer needed them.

Until one of the six young men playing Russian roulette in the back of the theater lost. He was smiling when he did it, halfway through a joke, so casual when he pulled the trigger. Later the other five would wonder if he was so loose because he never imagined it would happen, or because he was hoping it would. The sharp shot, the pained shouts from all who saw it, the smell of salt and gunpowder, killed the music, made the dancers spin and hit the floor, sobbing. A few rushing forward, trying to hold the boy’s head together, shredding their throats with cries for help. The first mate ran up with bandages and alcohol, saw what had happened, and just stood there, digging her fingers into the cloth. A woman standing nearby had taken the bullet in the thigh. Another was spattered with blood. A curl of brain on a third’s shoe. A small piece of skull had made it to the other side of the room.

Then all the torches on the shore winked out, and, for the people in the theater, the walls shook from the outside, as though the ship had struck something. From above, cries, shouts. Gunshots. Moans. Another shudder. The sobbing getting harder. It was the war, they all thought, the war had come for them at last. Voices rose toward panic. The second mate ran through the crowd, burst onto the stage, the spotlight gleaming off the horn in her ear. Grabbed the microphone.

“Anyone who can handle a gun, please help us now,” she said. “The rest of you, stay here.” A shock through the boat, greater than the last. The report of splintering wood.

“Where are you going?” Reverend Bauxite said.

“You heard the woman,” Sunny Jim said.

“…”

“…”

“You can handle a gun?” Reverend Bauxite said.

Sunny Jim shrugged, was gone. Reverend Bauxite followed him up the stairs, past people running to their rooms. Saying their prayers. The ship lurched again as they reached the open air. The hiss of bullets in the moonlight. The crew scrambling, firing. On the darkened shore, shapes ran along Sunbury’s broken wall. More shots. It was an ambush, an organized attack. Someone had seen the
Carthage
coming, rallied people and weapons to the river’s edge, and they were all firing now, though nobody on the
Carthage
could say why or even who was doing it. It was not the army. If it was the resistance, then someone had made a terrible mistake. Seven arrows lodged in the deck’s wood. A spear. There was no way to call any of it off. Andre, Elise’s boy, crouched just below the rail, eyes stark, muscles locked in terror. Before Reverend Bauxite could say anything, Sunny Jim was moving. Grabbed the boy’s ankle, dragged him across the deck into the stairwell. Then strode to the rail as if the bullets were afraid of him, would curve around him in the air. Picked up a rifle, loaded it, stood by the rail, and dug the butt into his shoulder. Took his time and shot. Brought the gun down and reloaded. Took his time again. Shot. Amid the shouting and stumbling, the bleeding and crying, his chest rose and fell in complete calm. More sure of himself with a gun than Reverend Bauxite had seen anyone be, even Aline.

But there were seven dead on the deck already. The second mate was sprinting from bow to stern, passing an order to all along the rail, when an arrow slid its point between her ribs, twirled into her left lung and a major blood vessel. She fell, coughing and spluttering, the horn clanking against the planks. She knew what was happening. She was bleeding out. She felt like she was drowning, though she could not say it. Lifted her eyes to the dark sky, as if she were sinking in the ocean, twenty yards down and dropping, and the clouds above were the sea’s rippling surface. It was not true what they said, she thought, that the end was peaceful.

The first mate ran to her, looked once at the arrow, at the second mate’s face, then got down next to her and stroked her hair. The second mate wanted to thank her. Ask her if she ever did drink a fifth of gin and then shoot eight out of ten bottles from fifty yards, like she’d said she could one night. To tell her that it was a good thing she did, taking that boy in. But she could not make the words come.

Then the sky tore open into blinding color and it seemed as if there were voices all around. The second mate felt a multitude of hands pulling her away, though she could not be sure.

In the theater, they had put out all the lights. They all lay on the floor, weeping, listening. The ship vibrated again, with less violence than before. A sign that perhaps the worst had passed. Yet the screaming, the shots, persisted, and Sergeant Foote, in the darkened theater, felt that old feeling again, the terror she was resigned to. That she would die very soon. That she would suffer a grave hurt. A limb taken off, organs loosed from their cage. It was happening on deck right now, she thought. A man on his side, legs digging into the wood, staring at his own intestines. A woman missing both legs below the knees. A man slumped against the pilothouse. Blanched skin, emptied bowels. Hands spidering across a clammy scalp. It was happening everywhere, the maw of war opened wide enough to eat a continent. They could see the flames at night to the south, from Millersburg, from Liverpool. The land on fire behind them, giving off too much light, with too much darkness ahead.

It took Sergeant Foote a minute to understand that the people next to her were huddling together, arms around each other. A hand on the small of a back. A gasp, a stuttering breath, a moan, as if of surprise. Clothes rustling against the floor.

Someone crawled to meet her, put his hand on her shoulder, his face close to hers. “I’ve been looking for you all night,” the con artist said. Foote said nothing. But she did stand up, take his hand, pull him up to her. They stepped over the couple beside them, headed up the stairs to her room, and closed and locked the door as the ship bucked and stuttered all around them. Shutting it all out to be open with each other, as they had never been with anyone. Kicking death in the teeth.

*   *   *

HER ROOM WAS VERY
hot after a few hours. They lay on a thin mattress, their clothes all around them in a ragged halo. He on his back, one arm behind his head, the other around her. She on her side, nestled against him, her head on his shoulder, fingers on his chest.

“So why can’t I trust you?” she said.

“Because I survive by lying.”

“What, like a con artist?”

“Exactly like a con artist.”

“That’s no different from what any of us are doing.”

“But now I want to tell you everything,” he said.

“I don’t understand why.”

“I don’t either.”

“I won’t reciprocate, you know,” she said. “There are certain things I need to keep secret. At least for a while. Until certain other things are settled.”

Does this involve the pistol in your bag? he wanted to say. He had seen the glint of light off the handle even in the near dark. Like the eyes of a rat, he thought. But he knew it was not only about the gun, not even only about the war.

They could not let the Big One into their heads. What good would it have done if they did? It would be as if the war had caught them at last. They were lucky that it had not, even though they had seen so much of it, her far more than him. The black night sparked with oily fire and the screams of the wounded. The constant odors of flesh—raw, burnt, rich with fresh blood, beginning to decay. They had not had the chance to figure out why they had survived, make it mean something. Would not accept being denied that.

“I understand,” he said, and felt the reply in her fingers, moving up his chest to curl around his shoulder. He could feel the air thickening with morning, the light changing through the cracks in the shutters. Someone was moaning through the wall, from love or injury, he could not tell. He would have kept them in that second forever if he could, kept the air suspended in their lungs until the dead receded far enough away that they could live with them without having to forget them.

*   *   *

BY MORNING THE
CARTHAGE
was clear of Sunbury, and there was a service for those who had died the night before. The bodies lay side by side on the deck. Captain Mendoza managed words even for those she did not know well. Made the attendees realize she was watching them closer than they thought. They rowed the dead to an island in the middle of the river, buried them in the damp earth amid mosquitoes and poison ivy and immense ancient trees, the wrinkles in the bark deep and dark. Reverend Bauxite presided over it all. Grant to us who are still in our pilgrimage, and who walk as yet by faith, that thy Holy Spirit may lead us in holiness and righteousness all our days. Grant to thy faithful people pardon and peace, that we may be cleansed from all our sins, and serve thee with a quiet mind. Give courage and faith to those who are bereaved, that they may have strength to meet the days ahead in the comfort of a reasonable and holy hope, in the joyful expectation of eternal life with those they love.

The congregation spoke their amens, first hesitant, then stronger and stronger, until they were speaking as one, and Reverend Bauxite felt the walls of stained glass rising around him, the vaulting ceiling over his head. Was grateful for the chance to build another church, even if it was out of the air, even if he would have to tear it down again. He was at the head of a congregation, and so, at the end, looked heavenward, spoke within himself. Jesus, of late, my people have had many funerals, and they are tired. He looked over the graves, the treetops, the moving river. Trying to listen, trying to hear. His faith staggering on its feet. Knife wounds and bullet holes in its skin. Defiant, shouting at the world: Give me what you got. It made him so strong. But revealed to him, too, his smallness before the creation—and what a creation it was turning out to be.

Behind them, a charcoal line slithered into the sky over Sunbury, as if from a burning house. Only the pilot noticed it, and he did not make much of it. There were so many fires now. He could not hear the voices rising in grief. Could not see the flames framing the pyres, already taking apart the bodies who the people of the
Carthage
had killed. A father of three. A mother’s only daughter. A cousin, a friend. The one who could not shoot a gun to save his life. Three girls, none over fifteen, who had fired off volleys in unison. They had attacked because they thought the
Carthage
was the war coming for them at last. The ship was too big to be anything else, the scouts had said, even though they all thought the war had passed them over, followed the highway, left their part of the river alone. They had hidden everyone who could not fight in houses away from the river and boarded the windows. The people sequestered inside saw the last light fade through the spaces between the planks, lit no lanterns to replace it. Debated in the dark what to do until the firing began, then hit the floor as one. The children mewling, held in trembling arms, parents pleading with them to be quiet. To them, the shooting was a week of no sun, no food or rest, and death racing across the water. Then a shout from outside, a voice they recognized. Come on out. A woman pried a board away, spied into the gloom.