The Elephant Mountains (2 page)

“We agreed at the beginning you'd have Stephen in the summer,” his mother was saying.

His father shrugged.

“You were happy with the way things were, Anna. Why change them now?”

He wondered why he had never spent a summer with his father when that was the agreement.

“He'll love spending the summer with you,” she said.

She put her arm around Stephen and gave him a hug. Involuntarily he felt himself stiffen. He imagined those young men putting their hands on her and felt a wave of anger sweep over him. This had happened before, but usually he could control himself better. And there were some of those young men he genuinely liked.

“You all right?” she asked.

“Yes, ma'am,” he said.

She removed her arm and took a drink of her coffee.

“I've got work to do,” his father said.

“Well, you can teach him about motors,” she said.

He knew his father did repairs on outboard motors. Maybe he sold them too. It was not something they talked about on their fishing trips.

“Don't blame me if he ends up being a mechanic,” he said.

“Oh, I'm not,” she said. “Only
you
would throw away a good education.” She turned to Stephen. “Did you know that your father has an engineering degree from Georgia Tech?”

He shook his head.

“Good Lord, Anna,” his father said. “Did you carry around a list in your head of the best schools in the country when you were fifteen years old?” He took a drink of his coffee and smiled at her. “Well, maybe you
did
.”

Stephen lay on his back on the cot and considered what he had learned. It was September now and instead of being back in school with his friends or marching around at some military school, he was here with his father. He had learned about outboard motors and airboat motors and guns. Along with the drums of rice and beans, there were cases of assault rifle ammunition. He had learned to shoot rifles and pistols and shotguns. He had learned to hunt and fish. It seemed to him there was no better way to live than the way they had been living.

There was no sign, as far as he could tell, of a woman ever being in the house. He could imagine how a woman like his mother might transform it. He could picture Courtland sitting at a sewing machine, yards of material trailing about on the floor, as he sewed furiously. If his father had a woman friend, he kept that a secret. Stephen did not think that would trouble him. He just preferred having his father all to himself after all those wasted years.

At first he thought his father was exaggerating when he called it a “paradise.” But he had come to agree with him. Before the hurricanes started coming, they would get up early in the morning and have coffee on the screened porch and watch the sun rise over the feathery-topped cypresses lining the big creek. Then the light would fall on the marsh, all those little channels shining in the light, and he thought that was the prettiest sight he had ever seen.

He wanted to remain with his father. His parents had discussed that. His father had met his mother in New Orleans to talk about it. He had been able to tell things had not gone well. His father was sad.

“What did she say?” he asked.

“You're stuck with her until you're eighteen,” his father said.

“She doesn't even want me there.”

“If a person gets the idea you're taking something away from them, they get real interested in that thing.”

He did not like his father using the word
thing
to stand for him, but he knew that his father was just giving him an example.

“Does she still want me to go to military school?” he asked.

“She wants you in New Orleans,” his father said.

His father looked old and tired. He was staring down at the floor, obviously thinking about something. Stephen waited for him to speak.

“You go back to New Orleans and have a good year at school,” his father said. “Study hard. You can spend the whole summer again next year.”

He was pleased that his father wanted him back.

“And interceptions,” his father said. “You'll have more this year.”

“Yes, sir,” he said.

For some reason, after this summer, he thought that he might look on his mother's young men differently when he met them at breakfast. He would think of them putting their hands on his mother, but that would not be the same either. He resolved that this year he would have a girlfriend. He would know exactly what his mother and those men did in the bedroom. And that knowledge would further change how he regarded them, move him closer to being an equal.

But then all those expectations and disappointments were wiped away when the hurricanes started to arrive. His mother and father talked on the phone about his staying through the first one. Then his mother seemed to prefer that he remain with his father when the second one approached.

“She hired that security service,” his father said. “Nothing like a few former Navy Seals hanging around to make you love a hurricane.”

The security people were there to protect the valuable furnishings of the house.

“Nobody's going to carry off a single piece of furniture, not a single painting,” his father said.

But then the phone service failed, and his father had no more conversations with her.

He was delighted he was stuck. He wished the march of the hurricanes across the Gulf would never stop.

Even work was not really work. They did not go into town to his father's shop anymore because the town and the road that led to it were underwater. They had been working on the engine of his father's airboat, moored at the dock in the marsh. Its 454 Chevy big block engine had been running rough. His father thought it was the carburetor, and they rebuilt it, but the engine still ran rough and sometimes would not start at all. So they were going to have to go into town in the johnboat and hope they could find a carburetor that had not been ruined by the water at his shop or the auto parts store. They could walk right in and take one off the shelf at the auto parts store since the town was evacuated two weeks ago. The thought of going into the deserted town and taking the carburetor instead of paying for it filled him with excitement.

He supposed his father, a wonderful shot, had learned to shoot during the Iraq War. But he found it hard to get his father to talk about the war. He did persuade him to reveal that he was in a “special unit.” But nothing much beyond that. He liked to imagine his father parachuting into the desert wearing night-vision goggles. His black parachute was like a piece of the night sky. Silently floating down amid enemy soldiers who had no chance at all. He wondered how many men his father had killed. But that was a question he knew better than to ask.

“But what was it like?” he asked.

“Sand,” he said.

“Sand?”

“Yeah, lots of sand.”

He heard his father begin to snore from where he slept on the couch just inside the door to the porch. His father was partial to sleeping on couches, dropping off to sleep with a book in his hand. His mother had complained about that habit. He wondered if he had bad dreams of the war, dreams of sand. But he had never heard him cry out in his sleep or wake suddenly from a nightmare. His father slept with a MAT-60 submachine gun. Stephen liked it that now he knew the names of weapons like that. He imagined himself sitting on a bench in the locker room at his school and casually mentioning the rate of fire of that French machine gun. His father wrapped his arms around it as if it were a woman. He wondered if his father slept with the machine gun when he and his mother were together. He could not imagine any of his mother's young men sleeping with a machine gun. But perhaps they did now, that is, if New Orleans was filled with anarchy.

To Stephen anarchy was nothing more than a word until last week when they discovered a man's body in the big creek with a bullet hole in his head. The man was dressed in a business suit. It was the first time he had seen a dead person. As they sat there in the john-boat, Stephen wondered how they were going to get him aboard without turning the boat over. He thought perhaps the best plan was to let him stay right where he was. But he did not say any of this to his father. Stephen knew that dead folks were supposed to be buried.

“Shouldn't we bury him?” he had asked.

“No, we don't have time to bury everything that's dead around here,” his father said.

Stephen supposed his father had seen plenty of dead people, and now they did not bother him at all. The dead man did not bother Stephen that much. He had not been in the water long enough for the turtles to get at him. He looked like if they towed him to shore and stood him on his feet he might wring out his clothes and walk away and nobody would know he had been dead at all.

His father gave the body a push out into the current with a paddle blade. It paused, spun slowly and then floated off down the creek toward the river only a few miles away. Stephen wondered if it would float all the way to the Gulf. He imagined the man's bones coming to rest in deep water, lying there in that absolute darkness forever. It was then he realized they were not living in paradise after all.

“I learned about killing people in Iraq,” his father began. “You have to be careful.”

He stopped and looked off down the creek. The body had disappeared. Stephen thought he was going to tell him that it was kill or be killed if a soldier planned on staying alive. His father then continued in a voice so low Stephen had to listen carefully.

“You cut yourself off from those you kill,” his father said. “They're just targets. But if you push too hard on that, then you cut yourself off from everyone.”

“Everyone?” Stephen asked.

“Yes, from love. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

But he did not understand. His father's comment about war being equated with sand made just about as much sense.

“We don't know what we'll have to do out here,” his father said. “Be careful.”

“Yes, sir,” Stephen said.

Stephen wanted to ask his father a thousand questions but decided to keep silent. It seemed to him that his father was expecting trouble, and the thought of that both attracted and repelled him. His father had been tested in Iraq. Now it was his turn.

Stephen reached down and felt the barrel of the Saiga-12 under his cot. The Russian-made combat shotgun had a twenty-round ammunition drum and a skeletal collapsible stock. He had fired it many times on his father's shooting range.

“Just keep shooting, even when they're down,” his father cautioned him. “Even with double-ought buck it won't be as easy as you think.”

He wondered what it was going to be like if they had to defend themselves. They were only five miles from the little town where his father had his boat shop. Everyone knew they had ample stores of food and fuel and water, all commodities worth killing for. His father liked to say that they now were living in a world in which anything was permitted.

They were all right during the storms because his father had built the house to withstand them. His father liked to say that if a tornado hit the house it would just bounce off and go on its way. The pilings the house sat on were steel, not wood. The house was made of concrete blocks over a steel frame. It was attached to the pilings with special tie-downs, and the metal roof was secured in the same way. Steel hurricane shutters protected the windows and the screened porch. So even the hurricane that hit them directly did no damage, although it made more noise than he thought was possible. And when it was over, they had fresh water from the big storage tank fed by a cistern. His father had released a few snapping turtles into the cistern. He liked to say you can't have a cistern unless you have a turtle or two in it. The water was filtered when it came out of the cistern, so the turtles would not do any harm. They had plenty of gas and diesel fuel in big underground storage tanks.

As he closed his eyes and drifted off to sleep, he found himself imagining holding the shotgun in his hands and firing at the dead man in the creek, who now was alive and bringing up an assault rifle on him. The shotgun recoiled against his shoulder, the ejected shells spinning out, their brass bottoms gleaming in the sunlight. The man's rifle barrel was swinging upward, but then the force of the buckshot caught him and he tumbled backward, like a wide receiver Stephen had laid a good hit on. His coaches had praised him for his willingness to hit much larger boys.

“Good boy,” he heard his father saying in his dream as he drifted off to a dreamless sleep. “Good boy.”

TWO

L
ate one afternoon Stephen put on waders and followed a deer trail to the edge of the marsh to try to shoot a couple of ducks. They would have them the next day for dinner. He took up a stand hidden from the house by a tree line and well concealed from approaching ducks by the marsh grass. He tried to stay still. He watched an alligator swim across the marsh to the creek. A banded water snake swam by a few feet away. Dragonflies darted about among the marsh grass. At dusk he expected to ambush some wood ducks when they came in to roost, or perhaps a teal.

He willed himself to be motionless, like a cypress stump or a clump of marsh grass, to be separate from time, to step out of the flow. It was something his father had taught him to do.

“Don't even think about time passing,” his father told him. “Ignore it. Then you can wait. Most people can't do that.”

He could not imagine his mother waiting for anything. She was not good at that. Then he felt bad for thinking things like that about her. She had worked hard in that bank; she had taken care of him.

He pushed the thoughts of his mother into some distant recess in his mind. He watched the play of the sunlight on the water, a ripple that could be a gar or an alligator or a snake. He imagined being a dragonfly sitting on a stalk of marsh grass, looking at the world through its faceted eyes.