Read Lost Everything Online

Authors: Brian Francis Slattery

Tags: #Science Fiction, #Fantasy

Lost Everything (7 page)

BOOK: Lost Everything
10.12Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

“Do you feel him?” she said.

“No.”

“The shadow man. He’s so close.”

“…”

“…”

“I want to go home,” Sunny Jim said.

“Sh.”

“…”

“I love it so much here,” she said. “I would live here if I could.”

 

The River

IN THE MORNING, THE
Carthage
’s deck was heavy with the peaty reek of animal droppings, the sugar of their milk. Refugees cooking breakfast in pots over hot coals. The crew throwing shouts and hand signals from bow to stern. An argument between strangers ended with one of them almost overboard, his assailant catching him by his ankles, then pulling him back up and smacking him across the face. A man in a bow tie tried to sell camels’ ears, for your dogs, for your kids, got no takers. Nine monkeys squatted on the tin roof of the pilothouse, brows furrowed, lips protruding. Surveying the chaos of human affairs with a wary detachment that preceded sorties for fruit. The skirmishes among themselves would come later.

Under the roof, Faisal Jenkins, the pilot, sat perched on a stool, fanning himself with a wanted poster folded like the bellows of an accordion. His bare feet on the pegs of the
Carthage
’s wheel. A thin cigarette rolled from a yellow receipt angling from two fingers. He eked out a drag, let the smoke waft from his mouth. Fanned himself seven times. Another drag, another fan. His vigilant feet moving on the pegs, responding to signals only he could feel.

“Do you ever sleep?” It was Judge Spleen Smiley, bandleader, with two cups of coffee.

“If I do,” Faisal Jenkins said, “I’m unaware of it. Why? You don’t sleep, do you?”

“I don’t remember the last time I was awake,” Judge Spleen Smiley said. “I’m only a musician in my dreams, see. In my real life, I’m a bookbinder. Denim apron, glue on my hands. The whole thing.” He took Faisal’s cigarette, put it to his lips, and dragged.

“Hey, I need that,” the pilot said.

“You don’t want this, too?” the judge said. Raised one of the cups he held.

“Real coffee?”

“Don’t tell anyone.”

“Where did you get it?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

The cup was warm even against the spring humidity. As if a living creature nestled in the pilot’s hands. The liquid was like bitter chocolate. He tried to discipline himself, but he could not. Drank it all too fast, under the musician’s smirk.

“To what do I owe the pleasure?” Faisal Jenkins said.

“I need a favor.”

“I figured.”

“It’s not what you think.”

“And what is it you think I think it is?”

“Whatever it is, it’s not what you think.”

“What is it then?”

The musician came in close. “Remember what you told me a couple nights ago?”

“No…”

“Well, you told me that when a ship is on a course that it won’t recover from—when its destruction is certain—the pilot is the first to know.”

“I said that?” the pilot said. He must have been drunk then, said too many things, things that sober Faisal would punch him in the stomach for saying.

“You did.”

“So what’s the favor?”

“If it happens to you,” Judge Spleen Smiley said, “if you know it’s coming, will you tell me?”

“Judge, I don’t know if I’ll know.”

“But if you do. Will you tell me?”

Faisal Jenkins’s earliest memory was of his mother, making coffee in dim light. A faint lantern, a wan flame. The aluminum coffeemaker with a half-melted handle, balanced on a seething blue burner. The coffee’s bitterness spiking the air. He liked the smell even then. He was an addict by the age of twelve. You’ll be a pilot yet, his mother said. Like your grandmother. Like me.

His grandmother was not born to be a pilot. She said she could remember when summers used to be dry, grass burnt to blond. Acres of dirt on farms. The heat bleeding the green off the leaves in the woods. She remembered the last time it snowed, too. Not a big storm. A few flakes, none ever seeming to land. She was in a car, walked through the flurry to get to the house. She went out later and it was already over. The ground wet but not white with it. A lip of it dusting the house’s gutters. If she had known it was the last snow, she used to say, she would have stayed out in it. Captured the flakes on the wool of her coat. Do as the smallest children do, fling out her arms, open her mouth, stick out her tongue. Snow tasted like ice, she said, like it and not like it. There was a tang in it, something brought down from the atmosphere. She never could recall what kept her inside that day. It never got that cold again.

The monsoons began, she said, not long after the snow stopped. First, a wet, warm spring. Then a spring and summer under clouds, two months of steady rain that dissolved houses, filled basements. The stairs from the kitchen dry only for the first two steps, the rest descending into brackish liquid. The rain seeped under the roof, around the chimney. Dripped into the fireplace that would never house a fire again. Crept across beams and under moldings. Poured down the walls of the living room until they shimmered.

There’s going to be a war over this, Faisal’s great-grandfather said. Outside their windows in western Pennsylvania, there was war in the forests already, old species flooded out, new ones flooding in, the trees from the south all moving northward year by year with the spreading warmth. Roads and sidewalks burst by them. A phalanx of flowers breaking up a highway. Great trunks growing in the middles of streets, hung with fiery flowers. Turning towns into woods, his great-grandfather said. You think this is forest? said his great-grandmother. Have you seen the forest? She had visited the day before. It was like humans had never been there. Like everything else was getting ready for us to leave.

“This place is becoming inhospitable,” Faisal’s great-grandfather said. Mopped his sweating brow. The great-grandmother looked out the window, into the dense flora. Heard the calls of large mammals, new fauna coming in.

“Just inhospitable to us,” she said. “There’s a big difference.” But what was coming next? she thought. And was she being greedy for wanting to know?

Under the rain, the Susquehanna grew, year after year. The first few monsoons were warnings to the towns along its banks. The river stole docks off the shore, rose against embankments and bridge pilings up to the roads. Then, all at once, it jumped. Started taking whole bridges and dams. For a month, his grandmother said, the river was a monster, eating the land. When it was done, there were wounds, raw with mud and metal, in every town it ran through, from Binghamton to the Chesapeake Bay. They had to redraw the maps. Some towns gave up, let themselves slip into history, into myth. The corner where he held her for the first time. The porch of the bar where she left him. The plot where his great-aunt, who had raised him as her own, was buried. The stand of trees by the river’s bank where she undid the buttons on her shirt after dark. Those places all taken by the river as it deepened, widened. Scoured out its channel.

The crews of the first boats sailed it with teeth clenched. Expecting to do as their predecessors had done, end in fire or drowning. But they made Binghamton, north of Binghamton, headed south again. Drifted past Owego, where children waved handkerchiefs from the porches hanging over the banks. There were strings of accidents, boats running aground and the river taking them apart. But the memory forgives, perhaps too much, and the Susquehanna at last became a highway. The days of a mile wide and knee deep are over, the captains told their passengers, we get so much more rain now—and that was the truth, but not all of it. Their pilots were special, had learned to read the water, its ripples and surges. Knew how to hear when it spoke of islands submerged just beneath the water’s surface. So Faisal Jenkins’s grandmother gave what she knew to Faisal’s mother, who gave it to him. His most vivid memory.

He had been on the water all his life. A boy who balanced on the rails during storms. Never slept in a bed that did not move beneath him. Pitied those who did, the sad kids on the muddy shore. Swinging themselves over the water on a rope, dropping themselves in, then thrashing back to land. Not for me, Faisal thought. Dragged a huge striped bass from the river’s belly and grilled it on the ship’s boiler. Until the night his mother woke him with a sharp nudge in the ribs, poured coffee down his throat.

“I need to tell you something,” she said.

“What?” he said.

“Everything,” she said. “Now listen close, because I’m only going to say it once. Then tomorrow morning, when we stop in Towanda, you’re getting off.”

“Why?”

“Just pay attention.” It took only a few hours for her to tell it all, for she had thought about it for years, distilled it into short, sharp sentences that he would spend the rest of his life cutting himself on. What her own mother had taught her, what she had learned herself. The river’s wicked ways. She was done before sunrise, and when the boat docked, she hustled him down the plank.

“You’re a pilot now,” she said. “Find your own boat.”

“Aren’t you coming back for me?”

“We’ll see,” she said. She died the next day in a boiler explosion. He was fifteen.

Judge Spleen Smiley was still looking at him, waiting. The coffee in his hands.

“Will you tell me?” he said again. “If you see it coming?”

“I’ll try,” the pilot said.

 

The Highway

WE KILLED HALF THE
towns along the river’s edge years ago when we put the highways through them, the ones we built in the second half of the twentieth century. We must have figured cars and trucks were better than railroads, and because we could not use the river for trade, we might as well not use it at all. Did we ask the people who lived in those towns if they needed the river? And did we apologize to their children? For the strip of pavement was a ravine, parting the town from the shore. Cutting off the roads and houses from the reason they had been put there in the first place. Making the towns places to pass through, pass over. When the war came to take everything, it found nothing to take. Nothing to eat. Progress had eaten everything already.

But in Marysville, just north of Harrisburg, there was a truce. The railroad and highway scarred the hill but left the town breathing. The houses leaning on each other in irregular blocks, as if they would all fall into the river together if the first one gave in. The church steeple tilting shy of vertical. A café with purple walls, a wood stove. The trains running through backyards, loud enough to crack foundations, but not enough to make the people who lived there leave. Then the war granted Marysville amnesty—it had spent itself at Harrisburg and its touch lightened for a time. It was regrouping, drawing strength for the towns and cities up the highway, turning Marysville into a scrappy garrison. But the army was bad for the town. The narrow streets choked with bivouacs, lanterns reeking of kerosene. Stalls on the church steps selling tobacco, cameras, plastic bags of sweet cheese. People without running water in their homes calling out to the soldiers in sharp voices: Buy this, buy this, you son of a bitch. Trash scurrying across the main road, lined with dim, smoking fires. Prostitutes calling to the soldiers in ragged, trilling voices. A row of tents made from men’s clothes stitched together, mattresses on the ground inside. A navy blue van with the wheels off, candles inside bubbling the vinyl seats. Four poles with sheets of plastic for walls and a plywood roof. A filthy RV parked on an island of grass, a torn Astroturf rug under the awning, plastic lawn chairs. It looked as if it were brought there before the war, on vacation. Had not been told what happened, that its owner had changed. That the people who were using it did not sleep there.

From the water, on a barge paddling up from Harrisburg, Sergeant Foote could hear three soldiers on the shore making music. One beating on a guitar, another on a wooden crate. The third clapping his hands. Out-of-tune three-part harmony, trying to pull down some gospel.

This train is bound for glory

This train, all aboard.

This train is bound for glory,

This train, all aboard.

This train is bound for glory

Don’t ride nothin’ but the righteous and the holy

On this train.

They were all drunk. Flogging the song to death, the words coming out wet and slurry. Soon it would expire, and the soldiers flop over, mouths open, gone from the world.

The camp’s dissipation began at the landing, got stronger along the street that led through the long stone tunnel under the highway, under the railroad tracks. Grand blocks of damp masonry. At the end of the tunnel, the street curved off and up to join the bigger road above. Rows of steel-framed hospital beds, cots on wooden frames, lined the tunnel’s walls. Soldiers dying. The stench of urine. Two doctors, eight nurses, running out of painkillers, switching to whiskey. It made the infirm rambunctious, hollering and shaking the bed frames. Three weeks before, six of them sprang from their sheets, danced down the middle of the tunnel in a line, arms locked, legs kicking in unison while the invalids clapped and cheered. The staff powerless against them. They ended by the sewer outlet at the riverbank, their feet in the water, daring each other. Come on, drink it. What do you have to lose? One of them did, and died four days later.

The highway above boomed with trucks, one after the other in a steady beat. A diesel caravan moving north, toward the front, drawing a wake of shouting and engine trouble. The prostitutes all waving good-bye. Come back soon. They knew they would never see those boys again. Sergeant Foote almost missed the old train station, which was hunched in a hollow on the side of the road, bristling with wires, antennae. Soldiers bustling in and out, hollering orders. As if the news had not reached them about the Big One coming in—the war was calamity enough and their eyes were fixated on its hot edge, the place where people burned alive, where the world was always ending, over and over again. An apocalypse at the tip of a shell, a bayonet, a turning bullet. There were people leaving the world at the very moment Sergeant Foote stepped into the station, hundreds of souls departing as her boot swung through the air, tapped against the tile. The air swarming with the dead, and the war still on, torching gardens, pushing over buildings. Pointing its smoking finger at the unlucky few who would go next. You. You. And now you.

BOOK: Lost Everything
10.12Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Hitler Made Me a Jew by Nadia Gould
Terminal Experiment by Sawyer, Robert J
Bound by Moonlight by Nancy Gideon
Flesh and Blood by Thomas H. Cook
Nightmare Before Christmas by Daphne Skinner
Snowbound by Blake Crouch