Lost Everything (6 page)

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, Reverend Bauxite thought, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.

The captain laughed, and Sunny Jim heard a familiar thing in it. A tone, a rhythm, shared with Aline.

“I want to thank you for getting us on board,” he said.

“It was the least I could do,” the captain said. “I held Aline in the highest regard, sir. How far are you going?”

“Binghamton.”

“What’s there?”

“The road to Lisle. Our boy’s there. Mine and Aline’s.”

“I see.” She gave him and Reverend Bauxite a look, a trace of his wife in it again.

“She never mentioned you,” Sunny Jim said.

“It was before your time.” She laughed again, held out her hand. His fingers curled around hers, the grip dry and tight. Like vines that take years to choke a tree. Harder than she expected, to look at him. And the skins of their palms shared an understanding of whom they both had touched. A memory lying along the nerves, though the cells on the surface had been shed and replaced years ago.

The captain grew up in a trailer hitched to a pink pickup under a stand of scrappy maples at the end of a dirt road rutted with tire tracks. It was hard for her to remember it. In the winter, the rain pattered on the metal above her head, like flying dogs landing on the roof. Long rides across dark country to get to her aunt’s house to learn reading and math. In the summer, the trailer walls sweated mildew. Mosquitoes at the screen, pumping their knees. They could smell the blood. Her father worked afternoons in a slanting shack that used to be the ticket booth for a drive-in, fixing tillers, small tractors. The stretch of asphalt in front of the tattered screen strewn with rusting machines being dismembered for parts. Her mother washed the floors of a clinic, around the feet of exhausted doctors who worked with fraying bandages, syringes used for years. They boiled the needles, dipped them in alcohol. Hoped for the best. Her father stood outside the trailer, chewing on the end of a stick. One of these days, he said, we’ll get this pickup moving again. Find some gas and haul our life out of here. But when she left, at the age of sixteen, the truck was still there.

Between her last walk down the tire tracks and when she met Aline, she remembered even less, though it all changed her, she knew. A cigarette shared on a porch hanging over the river, it must have been in Owego. Somewhere else, Johnson City maybe, she spied a man through a broken window, sitting on a bed, naked but for a paper party hat, playing a purple plastic guitar. A woman in a green robe sitting behind him, back against the wall, drinking coffee from a yellow cup, her other hand tapping out the beat on her knee. Then there was a damp sleeping bag in a cave on the lip of Cayuga Lake, the graffiti from two hundred years of teenagers in love all around her. The railroad tracks running beneath, smelling of greased metal. A black dog barking on the ridge. By the time she met Aline, the miles were in her muscles. Her eyes not quite as wide, her head clearer.

She was working in a diner in Deposit when Aline walked in. A jacket sewn for a high school sports team long ago, blue and yellow fading together toward a gray pallor. Patches of pink bands sewn into it. Half her head shaved. Light brown work boots. All of her clothes at least fifty years old, smelling like a closet, though the woman beneath did not. They were in Binghamton when the Susquehanna swelled its banks in a heavy monsoon, put half the city underwater up to the second floor. A man fished from his bedroom on Seminary Avenue. Women with canoes full of ripening fruit rowed among the submerged houses, shouting their prices across the flood. They saw shoes in the water, ankles. The tips of fingers. The city lost five bridges, entire neighborhoods, never got them back. The places where Ukrainians had eaten pierogi in the social hall before the services in the domed wooden church. Where small mob bosses had counted earnings in downtown houses while boys dared each other to walk the sewer pipes suspended over the river like rusting tightropes. Where the bus from New York City had pulled in at three in the morning, and people got on, bound for Ithaca, only an hour away. Why they needed to get there by four, why it could not have waited until six, until nine, was a mystery. It was Binghamton, and there had been shooting sprees, yes, and a sweeping rush through the city as the manufacturing left it, of boards going up over windows, buildings emptied and staying that way. But there had been bakeries, too: Roma, Vestal, cannoli and bread. Arches over the roads into the city, built by unions, fraternal organizations. A night in a club downtown back when there was still snow, and a band full of high-school kids trying to pass for older played loud, ragged reggae to a throbbing throng that shouted for more, until the next group came on and hit them even harder, and kept going after the young players were dead on their feet, loading their gear into their cars, still learning. It was all under the mud now, under the stones. But on a quiet night, when the water and sky and hills between were all moving toward the same color, and we stood on the banks under black branches and waded into the current, we could feel the water talking about it all, the words moving around us, running up through our bones, until the city was in us, the city and all that had come before, even though it was almost gone. Almost.

The captain fell into awe of the river then. It was the nerve of the land, carrying the memory of the city along with the ghosts of the hundreds of miles of white pines on the Pennsylvania hills. The thick oaks and maples of upstate New York. A forest as big as a country, darkness on its floor at noon. They said they logged it for trade, ship masts and two-by-fours. But you could see the fear behind what they did, the way the giants drank the light while the houses quivered beneath them. They had to kill it, all of it, to chase the fear away, but it would never go. She could still feel it on the roads in the hills, in the towns where people went to bed early, left her standing on the sidewalk in the sudden dark. In the towns, they were afraid, but they could not tell her why. On the river, at least she knew.

“I want to stay on this river forever,” Captain Mendoza had said, though she was not a captain yet, would not be for years. They were lying side by side on the deck of a barge, slipping by the last hills of New York, away from Waverly, into Athens, Pennsylvania. A candle weaving a scarf of smoke to keep the insects away. The spring flood silent beneath them. Aline got up on her elbows, looked to the banks. The trees up to their waists on the submerged shore. The river eating the houses beyond.

“Well, then you have a choice to make,” Aline said, “because I’m leaving.” She did not have to say how much she hated it. The captain could see how she stayed away from the rail. The kids on the barge tied yellow ropes to the stern and jumped in, rode the current on those tethers. Swinging wide on the river’s turns, arms and legs brushing by trout under the surface. Aline never put her feet in the water. As if she knew then, the captain thought, had a premonition that she would be down there for good someday, and just wanted to stay in the air for now.

The
Carthage
was fifteen miles south of Harrisburg when Captain Mendoza got the news about the Market Street Bridge and who had been on it. She lowered anchor, did not leave her quarters for two days. Closed the windows and lay in bed, staring at the warped timbers across the ceiling. The afternoon air thickening around her. At night the rain rolled across the deck and the birds huddled in their swinging cages. Below, in the vaudeville theater she had salvaged from an old movie house, the evening was beginning. Voices rising, the slap of cards, the rolling of dice. The clicks and shouts of six young men playing Russian roulette with a two-hundred-year-old gun. Bottles breaking across the floor. A scattering of music, struggling to coalesce but coming apart again in a pile of dying notes and cantankerous percussion. Two fights beginning in hoarse names and ending with splintering furniture. It was chaos down there, unless the band prevailed, and it would end as every night did since the war had gotten so bad: with people hurt, ruined shoes, a photograph destroyed, a pocketknife that belonged to a grandfather gambled away and lost. The sanctuary that the boat gave unable to altogether shut out the country beyond and what it had become. But that night all the noise seemed to come together into wails and moans, swooping sobs. As if they had pulled Aline out of the water, hoisted her up through the floor, laid her on a table. Let the cry go out that she was gone. Hacked apart the floorboards to fashion her coffin, fixed it with screws and twine. Bore her over their heads, passed her from hand to hand. The body rocking on a sea of palms as the band played and the people sang, she is dead, she is dead, and dropped to their knees in submission to their grief, opened their lungs and shouted at the sky. The end of their misery lay in another country, a place they did not want to go yet. Not if it meant leaving her behind.

No. No, no. The truth is, I do not know what the captain was thinking. I never met her, never got to talk to her. She was gone, and the
Carthage,
too, before I ever knew they existed. But you must allow me these lies. The violence I do to all of them, when I put holes in their skulls to show you the thoughts in their heads. It is the only way I know how to bring them back for you—them, the boat, the cities, everything—and let them into your head. Maybe then we can live again, in you. As though it were the last day, and we were all risen from the dead.

The House

THEIR CABIN ON THE
ship was dark and tiny, had a small window to the night outside. Reverend Bauxite closed the shutters, picked the hammock, and collapsed into it. He slept at once. Sunny Jim, on a mattress on the floor, could not. Lay awake clear through to the gray of the hour before the sun came. In the rocking of the boat, the walls flexed. There was shuffling, footsteps on the ceiling above him. Outside, a monkey screaming in a tree. Then the door to the hallway bowed, drifted open, and three boys shambled up it and across the ceiling, down the opposite wall, then across the floor, dragging their legs, pulling themselves into crouches around him. The past coming to visit.

“Long time no see, Jim,” Henry Robinson said.

“Yeah. Been a little while,” the Wallace brothers said, in unison. “Heading back our way?” One of them had his arms wrapped around his chest, trying to cover the hole on one side of his sternum. The other was missing his left eye, all the blood long gone.

“That’s the plan,” Sunny Jim said.

“Do you think you’ll get there in time?” Henry Robinson said. He had two holes in him, one in his stomach, the other in his forehead, above his right eye.

“I have to,” Sunny Jim said.

“It’s not up to you, though, is it,” Henry Robinson said.

“We have seen it,” the Wallace brothers said. Turned their heads northward. “What’s coming.”

“What does it look like?” Sunny Jim said. “Tell me.”

“Like the land and sky are going to sleep, and all their dreams are coming out.”

“The good dreams or the bad dreams?”

“…”

“You know what they’re talking about, don’t you?” Henry Robinson said.

“Yes. I do.”

When Merry was eight and Sunny Jim was six, there was a double murder in the hills behind their house, in the place where a small plane had crashed decades ago. The bodies were found at least a week after it happened, lying side by side, legs and arms straight, heads angled until they were almost touching, eyes still open as if watching something moving in the trees above them. It took a day to remove them from the woods. Nine men bearing them in stretchers carried them down Owen Hill Road, past their house. The kids’ mother told Sunny Jim and Merry it was rude to look, but Merry did it anyway. Could not stop staring, until they had turned the corner and were descending into the steep gully.

They had no idea how much had been lost already. Their elementary school in Whitney Point had caved in decades ago from water pooling on the roof. Rows of broken windows, shelves of rotting books. One part of the bus shelter in front of the school fallen over into the road. The parking lot overrun with spiky weeds. The doctors’ offices in town on the other side of the river had been abandoned years before they were born, after the last doctor died of tetanus, his jaw locked, his body arched off the bed in a convulsive rictus. There were no more shots, no more antibiotics, for anyone. After that, children were delivered in their houses by a man whose father had trained him as a veterinarian. He could do stitches, fix splints. Little more. But had an intuition about Merry by the time she was two.

“There’s a hospital in Binghamton that’s still open,” he had said then. “You might want to take her there.” The mother had screamed at him until he left, then hugged her daughter too tight to notice that the girl did not hug her back.

There was violence in the house then, shouting, splintering wood. Four babies crying. Dozens of extended family members brawling up and down the stairs. They were all made of kindling and gasoline, needed the smallest spark to go up. A fight between Sunny Jim’s father and one of his uncles ended with six planks of siding falling off the house, rattling together on the ground. It was too much, so many people living there, and they said how much they hated each other when they were angry, even though they were family and did not want to go. But they would in time, one by one, even if they had nowhere else to be. Two of the uncles, an aunt first. Just packed up three suitcases and walked down the hill, the aunt carrying her bag on her head. So long, old house. But that was not for a little while.

The siblings left the riot in the house and went out on the back porch. Moved into the grass gone to seed, the yard thick with summer’s rain, over the crest of Owen Hill Road. Through the fields overgrown with clawing saplings, the line of trees beyond, the patches of pine, the bleached trunks of birches, all swarming with vines. They passed into the woods as deer would, following a trail in their heads. The trees shaped like men, like animals. The ravines that turned to streams every time it stormed. The mossy foundation of a ghost building. Sunny Jim thought Merry was taking him to the hill where the small plane was. The broken wings still at angles. The glass from the cockpit lying atop the soil. It had been a game of theirs to sit in the metal frames of the seats and reenact the crash in reverse, until the plane was safe on the runway again, a century ago, preparing for takeoff. But Merry did not take him to the crash that day. Her path veered off the slope, descended into a valley that Sunny Jim did not know well. All at once the light was almost gone. The trees changed into black trunks against a fading gray, all flowing together, the air dead already. His feet cold in the dusty leaves. Merry just a shade that stopped, turned.