Lost Everything (19 page)

“You’re the preacher around here,” Sergeant Foote said afterward.

“I am.”

“Are there any others?”

“If they are,” Reverend Bauxite said, “they’re doing a pretty good job of hiding themselves.” Unaware of what a perfect thing that was to say to keep her from shooting him. Though it only meant she would come back later, gun ready. He did not have much longer to live.

“I need to talk to you,” she said.

“Confession?”

“You might say that.”

Without another word, he rose, retired to the corner where the Russian roulette player had died. The floor still darker where it had happened.

“What do you want to talk about?”

“I’ve done a few things,” she said. Though never been cruel, she told herself, never unjust. Even in Baltimore, I was never bad, though the walls were shaking.

“Like what?”

She turned for a moment. Looked upriver, where the clouds were thickening. A tight nausea gripped her abdomen, moved through her chest. Climbed up her throat. And then she was telling him, about all the people she had killed. The ones who had been shooting back, the ones who had been running. A few who did not see it coming. She had lingered over them all a little too long. Gotten to know their faces. A few times, she was sure she had seen the last of their lives leave them. Saw the muscles in the faces change, collapsing and stiffening, the eyes still open. They never once looked back at her. They were casting her aside already, pulling inward, moving out and away, and would not let her see where they were going.

“I quit the army after Harrisburg,” she said. A lie, a lie, but in that moment, she wanted to believe it.

“And they let you go?”

“No.”

Reverend Bauxite smiled. “Good girl.”

He said a few prayers then, offered her absolution if she would take it. The Lord has put away all your sins. Go in peace, and pray for me, a sinner.

“Thank you so much, Father. I’m so glad you came aboard when you did.”

Reverend Bauxite made no outward sign. Only hesitated a second, but spent it trying to stare into her. An alarm jangling in his head. Even on this boat, the war would not leave them be. How much of what she had just told him was a story? What was she here for?

“It may not look it,” he said, “but I’ve been on this boat a long time. Every ship needs a chaplain.”

“Especially now,” she said.

“Yes. Especially now.”

He blessed her again, let her go ahead, kept himself from running belowdecks to the room where Sunny Jim lay in utter slumber. He had not slept the night before, Reverend Bauxite knew. It was too much to uncoil from. The shock of the rifle kicking on his shoulder. The people on the river wall falling. His finger on the trigger. He must have marveled at how easy it was, Reverend Bauxite thought, how fast it came back to him. Knowing how the gun would buck, knowing to stay loose but strong, let the weapon do its work. But later it crept into him, that he had cut the wires of those lives, left the ends sparking in the air behind them. It was all for Aaron, all for his son, but that did not diminish what he had done.

In his dreams, Sunny Jim was laying on a bare mattress on a splintered pine floor. The walls moved, shimmered, broke away. He was in the shell of a warehouse in Syracuse. He was in Philadelphia. In Wilmington. All the places he had been before Aline. The Wallace brothers on either side of him, standing on his arms, looking down at him and shaking their heads. Henry Robinson crouched on his chest, his fingers in Sunny Jim’s mouth.

“Soon the dreams will sweep your boy up,” one of the Wallaces said. “You know what I’m saying, don’t you?”

Sunny Jim nodded.

“Soon he will know everything,” the other Wallace said.

Sunny Jim forced the fingers out of his mouth with his tongue. “But I want him to know everything,” he said. The fingers crawled back into his throat.

“The hell you do,” said Henry Robinson. “You tell him what you did to us, and he’ll be terrified of you for the rest of his life.”

Reverend Bauxite woke Sunny Jim up with a hand on his forehead, as he had in Harrisburg many times, and at once Sunny Jim was awake, alert, though his body was too tired to move its limbs. Still feeling the three boys holding him down.

“Jim,” Reverend Bauxite said. “I think someone is looking for us.”

“For what?”

“I don’t know. But if someone asks you who you are, you should lie.”

“Okay. Who should I be?”

“I don’t know. Something easy to remember.”

“How about I pretend I’m you.”

Reverend Bauxite looked at him. You shot people less than sixteen hours ago, Jim.

I know.

Stop joking around. Be serious. You owe them that.

I know.

“When we see Aaron,” Jim said, “we’ll have some stories.”

“What are you planning to tell him?”

The war raged in him. Tell him nothing, or you will lose him, him and Aline, for he will leave you when he hears what you have to say, and she will vanish in the telling. No. Give yourself up and tell him everything, and you all can live.

“I don’t know,” Sunny Jim said.

*   *   *

THERE WERE HOLES IN
the ship, the first mate told Captain Mendoza, from the assault at Sunbury. A good flood would sink them, the river peering in, then entering and pulling them down. The crew was moving over the
Carthage
’s hull, trying to mend the wounds. But they needed more wood, more metal. Anything to keep the water away.

“How is the boy?” the captain said.

The first mate shrugged. Dark patches under her eyes. The boy had woken her once by thrashing in his sleep, trying to tear his mattress apart. She shouted him awake, held him close. He would not say what had visited him, but she could guess. He fell asleep again, did not wake again until late morning. Came out and looked at the people tending their animals, conducting trade. A dispute near the bow that the captain broke up before there was blood. To the boy, the air around them was a boiling darkness. Greasy light spilling from everyone’s skin, their souls preparing to leave them. They have all come here to mock or gawk, he thought. Rawhead and Bloody Bones. He walked over to the nearest man, smiled at him, and introduced himself. Got the man to smile back. How do you do? When the man extended his hand, the boy grabbed it, bit into the soft muscle below the thumb, then did cartwheels from bow to stern, yelping as though he was in the schoolyard, waiting for his parents to pick him up. The captain glared at the first mate. Control your new boy. He needs it bad. The first mate caught him in mid-cartwheel, her arms around his chest. He shouted and flailed as she brought him to his knees, cradled him to her. There, there. Carried him to his bedroll on the floor, where he screamed himself to sleep. She lay next to him, ready to hold him when the dreams came again.

That kid is spooking the ship, some said, as though a bad spirit from the island had followed him aboard. Had luxuriated in so much death that it had become greedy.

“You’re the best thing he has,” the captain said to the first mate later.

“I wish I wasn’t. I wish he had better.”

Against her will, the captain’s thoughts became unkind. I wish my boat had no holes in it. I wish Aline were still alive. I wish I had a child. But this world was not made for wishes anymore. It was falling away around them, and soon the captain, the first mate, and everyone they knew would fall, too. That they would fall together was a comfort she did not want to pretend she was grateful for.

“Just do what you can,” she said. Wondered where the sudden, maternal lilt in her voice had come from. And at once the first mate was in her arms, but only for a few seconds. Said nothing. Then extracted herself, straightened her sleeves.

“I should see where he is,” she said.

She found him on the deck, cross-legged in front of the bass player, who was sitting on her bass, a rattling banjo in her hands. She was picking out a Skip James song she could only half remember the words to, though she nailed the humming, broken chorus every time. The music drained of hope, as if the man had seen these years coming, seen them and tried to tell us, but we did not understand.

“Do you know anything happier?” the first mate said.

“Not today,” the bass player said. “But tomorrow? Who knows?” Then smiled at her own joke, and each of the other three musicians, in different parts of the ship, smiled with her. They had played together so long that they were always in contact with each other, and with the man they had lost. Slim Herkimer, Herkimer Slim. They never knew which way his name went. But they all remembered the first time they heard him play. A trumpet, a guitar, a cello. A piano with rotting keys. It did not matter what he touched. Each of them swore later that they could see the air ripple around him when he played, and everyone within earshot swooned, their voices curling back in their throats. All the doors opened, the walls peeled away, and the music swelled into the space until it overflowed it and covered the world. They could hear it in distant deserts, over the waves of the sea. When Slim finished, there was a full four seconds of silence, and then a sound came from the people who had heard him, a stuttering, rising moan, as though he had given them a piece of light, a sharp spark that they held in their hands before it slipped through a seam in the sky.

After the audience left and he was putting his instruments in their cases, each of the musicians asked him if they could play sometime, if he needed a band, if he could stand a drummer. “Sure,” he said. “Let’s do it.” His eyes pointed at them, but were almost unseeing. He hummed in the long pauses between his words, the notes still coming to him even when he could not express them.

They became a five-piece. Judge Spleen Smiley did most of the singing, but as soon as Slim started to play, nobody heard a word. He taught them all how to put their voices into their fingers, channel their souls through metal and wood. Before the war they played at fairs and dances, on outdoor stages in searing sun, under sagging awnings in the rain, under the spread of stars. Even played at the West Side Ballroom once, though Elise was asleep that night, her child curled in her arms. They played late shows in raftered rooms murky with the light from a single dim lamp. Each of them had good nights, when they were the music’s instrument and they could feel the groove dig deeper, the people yell louder, dance and drink a little more. They could feel how they were bringing everything together. But none of them could touch Slim. The best nights, he played for hours, eyes closed, rocking back and forth. Fingers moving as if they were independent animals. Those who saw him couldn’t talk about it for a few days, then talked about nothing else.

They traveled together on a wagon with a plastic sheet tented over the top, piled beneath it with all their instruments. Four horses in front, pulling them through the country. When it rained, they found shelter for the horses, huddled together under blankets in the wagon and dropped into sleep, one after the other, in fugue. When it did not rain, they slept on the ground. Never stopped marveling at the vastness of the sky. As if the music was opening their heads to everything, letting them step into a single moment, then stay and stay.

They heard the war before they saw it, a long tearing whine from the far side of the hill behind them. They turned and looked, saw a flash of light that Judge Spleen Smiley mistook for a meteorite, until there were too many for it to be natural. None of them slept, listening to the war dismember the town down the road. They had just played there, the bass player thought. There had been rumors, people going home early. More guns than usual. But at their show, there was a woman with purple plastic earrings, in a white blouse, dancing close with her man. Resting her head on his red shirt. Three men trying to grow mustaches, who drank too much but never got nasty about it. Sat on the bar, swinging their legs, hollering come on, honey, you know I’m worth a try. Four women ordered eighteen shots at once, to make sure they had enough for the night. The smallest of them put down eight of them herself, insisted on getting up to sing. She was good. A husky alto, knew some old country, some old jazz. Knew what the people in that room wanted and gave it to them. They cheered at the end and she curtsied, pretended she was wearing a skirt.

They did not gig as much as they wanted to after that. Played cinder-block social halls that survived the fires. Field hospitals. Weddings and funerals that both ended in breaking glass and blood in the dirt. A man passed out facedown in the road, one hand on a greasy pistol, the other on a glass bottle, the inside still shiny with a thin stripe of rancid alcohol. Baptisms frequented by white-haired grandparents hobbling forward, stretching out their arms to hold the children in shaking hands.

Two weeks before he left, Herkimer Slim—Slim Herkimer—played the best they’d ever heard from him, in a former grocery store in Harrisonburg, Virginia. It did not start well. Broken lightbulbs and snapped strings. A splinter in the top of his guitar. A wire that kept shorting. But people stayed to listen, as if they sensed what was coming. A drop in air pressure, a change in the light. Someone coughed, scuffed his shoes, and Herkimer Slim closed his eyes, did not open them again until dawn. His teeth glimmered between parted lips, fingers twisting and rushing. The notes in alien intervals, showing you the way in, then throwing you heavenward, holding your head under the water and lifting you out again, exhilarated and gasping for oxygen. He was crying for the last hour, but the notes spoke of nothing but joy. Only fifteen people heard him that night, but he changed the directions of their lives. Caused marriages, divorces, children to be conceived, raised better. Raised the best they could be. He did not sleep at all the next day, then slept for fifteen hours straight. At their next gig, it was as if the last one never happened. But as they were all putting their instruments away, he gave one long last blow into a clarinet, a high cry that spoke of grief and rapture, and then disappeared. It was only later, when his band thought back on it, that it began to seem as though he’d known he’d have to go, had some music he needed to play before he left. They told each other that over and over again, the story they pieced together to make his loss bearable. They played the music he left them as well as they could, and to those who had never heard Herkimer Slim, Slim Herkimer, it was revelatory. I love you guys, someone had told them once, always hanging back even when you rush forward. They nodded to each other, for they all knew what they were doing. Leaving room for him at the center of their sound, as if the last note he played was still going on somewhere, sustaining them through their lives, and if they hung back far enough, they could still hear it. Sometimes I think I can hear it, too, and my daughter is singing along.