Lost Everything (25 page)

“Why are you telling me this?” Sunny Jim said. “You can tell Aaron yourself.”

“Jim. I’m not sure I’m going to make it.”

“Of course you will.”

“Just promise me you’ll tell him.”

“You’re going to make it,” Sunny Jim said.

“Promise me,” Reverend Bauxite said. “He’s my son, too. The closest thing I’ll ever have.”

“I promise,” Sunny Jim said. Forgive me, Aline, he thought. I should have told you so much more.

The Highway

THE FRONT WAS LONG
behind them, and for Ketcher, it was as if they had launched from a beach into the open ocean, from the ground into the sky. The road to Binghamton moved through close, steep hills, choppy swells in the land, and the truck did not like it. It was beyond complaining. The engine gave out a constant, sonorous grumble, now and then a long, wavering whine. Even the soldiers who knew nothing about cars could tell it was dying.

There was no resistance, no volley of fire from the highway’s shoulders, no bombs planted in the pavement, but the road was coming apart anyway. Maybe it had been bad from the beginning. The winters, when there were winters, the shifting earth, broke the infant road’s back as it was laid down. Years of patching with pebbly asphalt could not cover how it had been crippled, could not repair it anymore, and the land began to pry it apart. Trees crept closer, forced their fingers through the dried tar. The big rains floated sections of it away on a hillside softened into a wave of mud. The truck winced on every crack. For the last fifteen miles, the driver and commanding officer shared a conviction that they would not make it to the forward camp. Were relieved to be wrong.

The camp was a clot of wet, tattered tents around the broken building of the former welcome center at the state border. Five soldiers, slumped in the dawn behind a wall of sandbags on the highway, waved their rifles to usher the truck through. Buckets on the ground to catch rain. Trenches carrying water to the parking lot, sheened with three inches of brackish runoff. Six feet into the pond, a boot, lying on its side, as if trying to drink. The boys in the camp were thin, stooped. Not boys anymore. They shuffled in the mud, seemed not to notice the skin of dirt crawling up to their knees. They lay down on the patches of dry ground, appeared asleep but for their open eyes. Almost no speaking. Two of them led Tenenbaum to their commanding officer’s table. Its legs rickety on the tile floor of the old building. Shattered glass and crumbled cinder blocks all around, uncleared.

“You’re here,” the commanding officer said.

“Yes,” Tenenbaum said. “Are you?”

The commanding officer opened his mouth, but did not speak. Could not say how the last weeks had been. The hours, days, of waiting, of meaningless operation, before the coming push up the highway into Binghamton. The things they had seen in the sky at night. What they thought they’d heard. Eight of his men had killed themselves over it, the latest one just two days before. Slit his own throat with a piece of jagged metal he must have found in the trashed bathroom. They buried him the day after, the commander presiding. He watched the boy go down, wondered how he’d had the will to finish the cut. Realized, in a moment of revulsion, that he understood how he’d had the will to start it.

“No,” he said. “We’re not all here.”

“I see.”

“Do you? Do you really?”

“…”

“Do you have any sense of when my men and I move?”

“A day,” Tenenbaum said. “Two at the most.”

The commander sighed. Something seemed to leave him that he did not want to go. “They’ll be glad to hear it,” he said. “We’ve been up here too long. Do you know what I’m saying to you?”

“Yes.”

“Do you now?”

“No.”

The four soldiers slept for five hours, walked out of the camp in the late afternoon. Left the highway behind for the small roads that followed the rivers. Joined a branch of the Susquehanna where it curled south from Binghamton into the steep, huddled hills. It took them another day to skirt the city, where the shooting was already starting. Ropes of smoke rising, chased by flares. The fading lights in the valley behind them, the darkness to the north. The wound in the firmament above them their compass needle. Then they were walking along the highway again and it was dark, darker than it had been for any of them in a long time. They walked off the road into the tall grass to put themselves down for the night, but it was too quiet to sleep. At first light they moved again, departed from the interstate to a road where all the houses leaned, sagging as if knocked out in a fight. Barns missing teeth, missing jaws, waiting for the final breath that would push them over. Cars in the driveways with their doors open, rain-soaked seats rank with mildew. Abandoned fast, as though their owners had always been ready, as though their parents had taught them how. They were on the long arm of Appalachia, its shoulder in Georgia, its fingers buried somewhere under the miles of pines stretching to the Canadian border. The people that lived on it had always been hidden, were always disappearing. Towns and cities vanishing under collapsing mountains, rising rivers. All those houses at the bottoms of reservoirs. Porches and living rooms thick with muck and algae. A brood of snapping turtles lumbering across the dining room floor. A school of perch shimmering up the stairs. Curtains wafting in the current through the open windows, as if blown by a subtle breeze. This thing that scares us so much, they lived with it for generations. The land rejecting them, the rivers coming to get them. Their kids covered in black dust, sliding into holes in the ground and never coming out. They saw all of this coming, put it in their songs, songs with thin stabbing voices, melodies angled like broken glass. They tried to tell us that what had happened to them would happen to us, too, but we could not hear the message. Mistook it for nostalgia, when they were speaking prophecy.

Six miles to Lisle. The last stretch of road through Whitney Point, past the school, the motels, the fairgrounds. The antique tank on a slab of concrete, painted green from the caterpillar treads to the end of the barrel. All mottled with rust. The long cyclone fence bowing in the middle. The clouds in the sky moving north in an unnatural pattern, streaking toward a focal point, as if being pulled there.

“It’ll all be over soon,” Tenenbaum said. “The war, I mean.”

“Do you think so?” Ketcher said.

“Here we are on the northern end of it,” she said. “They say it stops in Binghamton. And look around you. This place doesn’t even know about it.”

“What do you think you’ll do?” Ketcher said. “When the war ends.”

The other three stopped, turned, looked at him. Up at the clouds.

“Come on,” Ketcher said. “We can’t live like this, the way we are now. Just for a minute, pretend it’s not happening, will you?”

“…”

“…”

“I’m going to go to the beach,” Tenenbaum said. “The longest one I can find.”

“All the beaches are gone,” Jackson said.

“There must be one somewhere,” Tenenbaum said. “I know there is. And when I find it, I’ll just stand there. Put my feet in the water and stare at those waves coming in. Like it’d look if I were on a ship, right? Heading out to sea.”

“And then what?” Jackson said.

“I don’t know,” Tenenbaum said. “That’s the whole point.”

Jackson nodded. “I want to have another kid,” he said.

“Thought your wife said no,” Tenenbaum said.

“When she sees me at the end of all this,” he said, “there’s no way she’ll refuse me.” His dreams the last few nights had been full. First of his wife, carrying a pregnancy while they hoed, planted crops in long furrows, sat on the porch and prayed for rain. Then the child, a girl. Always with black hair, tan skin, bright blue eyes. A firecracker, where the boy had been cautious. Patient, where the boy had been impetuous. As if the boy were still alive and the siblings were defining themselves against each other, carving their own spaces into the world. Yet she was still the best of her parents, just like the boy had been, and in the dream, they stood behind the girl, arms around each other, marveling that people such as they could create a child like that.

Largeman was walking point, his back to them. The request hung in the air: Ask him, ask him. But they did not want to do it, did not want to know what his plans were. He’ll take a job at a farm, Ketcher thought, shooting cattle in the head. Drowning the barn cats in the pond. Or find another man like him, and each will goad the other until they cut a stripe of chaos across the neck of this country that ends with a shoot-out against the chipped wall of a schoolhouse. Each of them with three dozen bullets in him, but not before they create nine corpses, put two women in a coma, take off a boy’s foot. Or maybe, Ketcher thought, Largeman has become too much the war’s creature to outlive it. There will be a month of vagrancy, an abandoned attempt to fix the axle of a rusted truck. A string of splintering hallways, the wind purring through the cracks in the windows. Then a gun under the chin, the caliber high enough to paint the ceiling. Yes, Ketcher thought, for a man like that, there is no other way. And then Largeman stopped, turned. Looked at Ketcher, his face stricken, terrified. He barked out four sobs, coughing on the last one’s tail. As if he had seen what was in Ketcher’s head, and knew, with a certainty that Ketcher could never have, that the private’s final vision was about right. He had only a little time left, and so much to be sorry for.

They knew where Sunny Jim’s family house was from the papers in the satchel. Turned off Route 79 to follow the bent sign pointing to Owen Hill Road, Killawog. The houses around them, the paint half sanded off by rain, were all empty. Things on the lawn, big pieces of furniture, three chairs. The doors left open, a few jammed open with scraps of wood. Notes pinned to ripped screens, half unreadable, unable to hold the words against the weather. We are going south on 17. Meet us in Livingston Manor. Meet us in Monticello. We will wait for you there. Please find us, please. We love you to the sky and back.

The soldiers left the houses behind, walked over the rise in the road and over the dike, followed the pavement’s curve through tall grass shaded by huge trees closing in over the swelling stream. It was almost dark again, and under the long branches, darker still. A heavy mist in the air. The shapes of houses hiding among the trees. The road rose into the gloom, and the four soldiers went quiet, ascended in a staggered line. Then they were out of the gully and there was a little more light. Enough to see the house before them, a black hulk spiking into the sky. They each paused for a breath, began to flash each other hand signals. Tenenbaum surveyed the grounds, the pitched lawn, the gravel driveway. Then she raised her hand, pointed at the front door, and each of them took a step forward. They did not know that the first bullet from the attic was only four inches from Tenenbaum’s skull, the second bullet halfway to Ketcher’s eye. The third in the chamber, the fourth in the cartridge, tiny lugs of buzzing metal, jumping, ready to fly.

*   *   *

I FOUND JACKSON IN
northern Virginia. A small man, husky, nimble, a wrestler. A wide blast of scar tissue across his cheek that made one eye squint. His wiry wife just beginning to show. I think it’s a girl, she said. It feels like a girl. They both ate everything I gave them, too fast. They had not eaten enough of late.

After his wife slipped off to sleep, I asked. “Do you mind telling me what happened?”

“Mind? No. I tell everyone what happened.”

He had found Ketcher’s family, told them what he knew of their son, so they could grieve and grieve right. Tried to find Largeman’s family, too, learned that they’d all been killed in the first year of the war. He liked to think he understood the man better after that, though he could never be sure, for Largeman had said so little. Then he took my hand in his, turned it over, studying my palm. Smiled a little as his wife and unborn child stirred in their slumber.

“If only we all knew each other a little better,” he said. “Maybe all this would have been a little different.”

They were going to the shore next, he said, to wait for the Big One. A place with fish and shade, a pail to catch rain. He would take the war in his head and push it below the surface, sink it to the bottom and never let it come back up. For his wife and child needed him there, for whatever time they had left, and he wanted nothing more.

The House

IN THE END, THERE
was only the mother, the father, Merry, and Sunny Jim in the big family home. The mother and father still in the same room, too tired to fight anymore. Sunny Jim slept on the couch in the living room, woke his father every morning with the creak on the stairs when he went back to his room for clothes. He heard his father shift in the sheets, let out a sighing groan. His mother off hours ago. Every spring the father and mother hauled everything into the hallway and painted their room a blinding white. They let the rest of the house go. Boards fell rotting off the side. The walls ran with the tracks of water damage. Nobody except Merry had gone to the third floor for years. Once, Sunny Jim had not seen her in a week, heard something moving up there. Went to the bottom of the stairs and called up into the grayness. Merry, are you there? Please say something. He heard movement again, and just stood there, calling her name, until the movement stopped. Late that night, she sat on the rug next to the couch, woke him with a hand on his shoulder.

“I heard you calling,” she said.

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“You wouldn’t have been able to hear me. I wasn’t in the house.”

“How did you hear me, then?”

“…”

“Merry. Tell me you’re all right.”

“…”

“You’re my only sister. Don’t go.”

“I won’t. Not without telling you first.”

But the people in the valley were still talking about her. How they saw her going into the woods, coming out again. There was blood in her hair, they said, a streak of it on her cheek. What’s she doing out there?

“Deer,” she said. “Almost always deer. Sometimes a grouse.”