Burn, p.13
Burn, page 13
“Pay goo,” the girl said. She had sagged on Storey’s back and she said it with her head turned toward the houses and her cheek and mouth on the shoulder of his jacket. It muffled the words.
“What?” he said.
“Pay goo.”
Storey shrugged her higher and said kindly, “Say it into my ear.”
“Play group!”
“Ow.”
She pointed toward the back of a house with an elaborate homemade swing set with fort and slide and a sandbox bordered with railroad ties.
“That’s where you go?” Storey said.
“We make ice pops.”
“You do?”
“Unh-huh. We can eat two.”
“Wow. Are we close to your house?” They were almost to the top of the alley, two more houses to go. Storey jiggled her.
“Wanna play horsey?”
“No.”
“What’s your name?”
“Collie.”
“Do you know how to spell it?”
Silence.
“Is your house over there?” Storey pointed north, toward the next street and its opposite row of houses. She nodded against his neck. “Okay, let’s go.”
* * *
Again they slipped between buildings and came out onto Main Street and looked down toward the water. Jess thought it looked like any neat, well-cared-for seaside village in New England except that more than half the buildings had bullet holes sprayed across the front, burned porches, projectile holes in the roof. The other half stood in a sort of becalmed idyll, preserved and abandoned. Jess wondered why Beryl had not been burned to the ground like the other towns. Had the residents come out en masse and gathered on the wharf, waving white flags? And so been spared? No, there were bodies. But the village was mostly standing. Made no sense. Especially after they witnessed the way the choppers had responded to the girl in the rowboat, and to them in Newsboy. That was it: it seemed like they, whoever they were, wanted no witnesses at all. He shuddered. Maybe the villagers had all surrendered and been taken off to who knew what mass grave.
Her house, it turned out, was on the north end of School Street, the third cross-street up from the water. The house was timbers and stucco, with wide eaves and clean lines along a generous, almost rambling width. Maybe it seemed less boxy because it was not hemmed in by other houses; beyond it were only the pines and hemlocks of the deep woods. Despite the broken front windows along the gallery porch and the pocks in the walls, it preserved a certain calm and grace. Also, it was not pretending to be anything. There was not a lobster trap or buoy in sight. No whaling-ship weather vane. Jess thought this was probably because it was off the two main drags, tucked at the end of this side street. Had the attackers been in such a hurry? Had the girl survived because her parents had hidden her in a cupboard and run out with their hands up? Something about the architecture of the house, the unpretentious elegance, suggested that whoever built it would be capable of such an act.
By the time they got within thirty yards Collie had straightened tall like a rider standing in the stirrups and she was calling for Crystal. Storey walked forward and then veered suddenly.
“Hey!” he said abruptly. “I saw the cutest little deer in the trees! Hold on!” He trotted away from the house and toward the woods as she protested and squirmed backward, and Jess took his cue. When he saw that they were well into the trees he jogged up to the house and dragged the big black mutt fast across the street and behind a boat trailer. The poor dog had been gut-shot and nearly torn in half. Jess ran back to the house and heard Storey saying loudly, “Dang! That was the cutest little doe. All spotted! Okay, we can look later.”
He carried Collie out of the trees and exchanged a look with Jess and they stepped onto the porch.
“Mommy!” she called. She struggled and Storey let her slide to the boards.
“Hold on,” he said. He crouched down till their faces were level. He held her firmly by both arms and very gently said, “We’ll go look for your mom in a second. But first Jess has to go in and make sure it’s safe. Make sure there’s no one bad in there. Okay?”
She looked from the splintered front door to Storey and back and shrank with a sudden fear and nodded slowly. Jess turned the knob and shoved hard with his shoulder, and the door swung on one hinge.
* * *
In the movies, when the bad guys toss a place, the books are pulled to the floor, couch pillows knifed open and thrown, etc. That’s how the house looked. Every room. But he was relieved to find no bodies, no more savaged pets. The interior was as gracefully and simply appointed as the exterior, and would have radiated a similar confidence and calm. Lampshades were patterned sparsely with real leaves. Walls were a sanded plaster with exposed timber headers over the windows, probably Douglas fir or red spruce. The curtains, though ripped from their rods, bore an understated twining-vine pattern. Jess could feel, even amid the chaos, the ordered attention to beauty, and even now the return of a pervasive calm.
Below a shelf beneath a large window was a scattering of shattered picture frames. He turned one over: Collie, probably a year or two ago, sitting happily in a pile of leaves with Crystal sprawled against her, head in her tiny lap. Jess slid three more to him, careful not to get glass splinters in his fingers. One showed the four of them, the two parents, late twenties, with Collie on his shoulders and Crystal at their knees. They were on a small dock, the shore of a lake somewhere, maybe this one. The father was broad-shouldered, had a trimmed reddish beard and thick black glasses that enlarged his gray eyes. He wore a navy baseball cap on backward and was smiling hugely, and he had good, very white teeth. Jess felt the charisma from here. Mom was compact and pretty, with black shoulder-length hair in a simple silver Japanese hair clip, which Jess could see because her face was turned gladly up to her husband and daughter. The next photo was in a pewter frame, glass still intact, and showed the dad, hatless now and in a dress shirt, with his arm around a petite older woman with short straight gray hair, unsmiling but not unhappy. She also wore thick glasses, and her eyes were a dark gray—clearly, his mom. They stood in front of a shopwindow lettered with the words “Grantham Gifts.” The last picture was smaller, framed in simple walnut, Collie and her dad in an outboard, both holding up fish and grinning. He hefted a two-pound silver lake trout, she a brookie the size of a hot dog, but they beamed with equal measures of pride. Jess collected the four small frames and brushed off the broken glass and carefully set them standing back on the shelf; he didn’t know why. As he turned he noticed an envelope under a heap of torn curtain on the floor. He bent again, slipped it out, turned it over. It was a bill from MidLakes Electric, and in the address window above 117 School Street were the names Silas and Suzanne Beckett. He folded it and slipped it into an inside jacket pocket.
He came back out onto the porch and shrugged.
“It’s been tossed,” he said. “Like in a TV show. Otherwise”—he made a horizontal motion with his hand—“your call.”
Collie was wild to go inside now, and Storey understood that unless he let her see what had happened to her home she would be refractory and impossible ever after. He knew this because he had kids. And so he said firmly, “Hold my hand,” and she stilled immediately to the command in his voice and reached up and grasped it and they stepped over the threshold.
* * *
She could not speak or muster any word at all. She made a small sound like a whimper or a hum and led Storey forcefully from room to room. She stopped short at the shelf with the three photos and pulled off the one of her and Crystal in the leaves and she brought it to her face and rubbed her nose against the print. “Crystal,” she said simply. She stood it back up the best she could, and Jess helped her. Then she picked up the one of the whole family and she freed a hand and touched the man and said, “Papa.” She didn’t cry. Then she pulled Storey through the whole house. She made a full circuit and went straight back to the kitchen and released Storey’s hand. She crouched beside the worn and stained braided rug beneath the farm sink and pulled back one corner. Jess noticed a thread of clear stout fishing line extending from one end of the rug and going through a hole in the planks. Countersunk flush to the floor was a heavy ring handle to a trapdoor. Breathing hard, almost hyperventilating, she grabbed it with both hands and tugged.
“Hold on,” Storey whispered. “Hold on, Collie, I got it.”
The hatch was big enough for an adult to slip through, no bigger. The stairs were steep. Storey felt for a light at the edge of the hole and there it was, a bright battery-powered LED. He went down and lifted her after him.
Musty, but neat and clean. There was one expected wall of canned food and Ball-jar preserves and plastic buckets of probably grains; three cots with thick synthetic mummy bags; a shelf of books; rows of five-gallon water jugs. Jess remembered the rule of thumb—one gallon per person per day—and multiplied the thirty jugs by five and divided and figured they were set up to stay almost two months. The provisions were no help now. But what most interested him were the two marine batteries on the floor beneath a long shop bench, and the radio set on top.
Chapter Ten
Jess’s Uncle Harvey, who lived a few miles up the road on Putney Mountain, was a ham-radio nut. He had “friends” all over the country, all over the world, with whom he stayed in regular contact. “Friends” was bracketed in Jess’s mind, because he didn’t understand how one could consider anybody a friend whom one could not touch. Whose breath one never felt against cheek or arm, whose smell was as unknown as the true richness of a voice unmediated by radio waves or digital transmission. Someone with whom one had never broken bread or shared a consoling hug didn’t seem a bona fide friend.
Jess had classmates whose regular buddies were a thousand miles away, on the other side of a video-game console. He understood the need for human contact, but he did not understand the social-network “Friends” thing; claiming scores of strangers one had never met seemed cheap and somehow sad. He thought his uncle was truly odd. Harvey lived amid what Jess thought must be some of the most beautiful country on earth and he rarely went outside except to roll his garbage bin back and forth from his carport to the edge of Osgood Road. He spent all his time at his radio bench or in a recliner that looked like a NASA spaceship seat. He drank Diet Dr Pepper nonstop. He shaved intermittently. He was a cipher.
Jess liked him. For one, Harvey had an easy laugh and he seemed to truly enjoy Jess’s stories. He was interested. He prompted Jess to tell him what was going on in his life, what characters he’d met lately who intrigued him. He leaned forward, elbows on skinny knees, and gave Jess his full attention. Skinny knees. That was another mystery: he was rail-thin. The stereotype of a man with his passions was someone overweight who moved more like a parade float than a big cat. Not Harvey: he seemed agile. Was he a drug addict? Sedentary and corroded inside but unable to keep on weight? Jess looked for signs, and except for Harvey’s occasional bleary, bloodshot eyes from staying up into small hours—so he could converse with a buddy in Sulawesi—he found none.
One May afternoon when Jess was sixteen and visiting, his uncle took a scheduled call from a regular in Norway, and as he began the trading of call signs and frequencies that were preparatory to a less formal conversation, Harvey glanced over at his nephew and caught him watching with an expression maybe of distaste or even disgust. Maybe Jess just looked perplexed. When Harvey was done with the call, which lasted ten minutes, and included the revelation that Jørgen was at sea on his ketch at the moment, Harvey hung up his headset and swiveled his chair toward Jess and smiled, mouth compressed, but his brown eyes were serious, even grim. He rubbed the graying stubble on his jaw and said, “You think I’m a freak, huh?”
Jess was aghast and mute. His jaw might have fallen open. That was kind of exactly what he’d been thinking.
“You think a man who spends his life on a radio and has few friends but those that come over an airwave is not a man, or at least not living a real life. You think I’m a shell. Right?”
His eyes roved over Jess’s face and he continued: “A shell of a man you can’t help but like.” Now Harvey’s eyes creased and his smile became real. “You can’t help it. Family is family.”
Jess was stunned, more by his uncle’s accuracy than by any sense of confrontation, and he could still not speak.
Harvey scratched his chin with one finger and glanced down at Jess’s feet. “Are those your running shoes?”
Jess nodded.
“You’re wearing shorts. Good. Wanna take a run? Blueberries?”
Blueberries was a three-mile loop that climbed steeply through woods up a rock-slabbed four-wheel-drive track, crossed a stone wall and a meadow crowded with low-bush blueberries, and descended to Sawyer Brook, where it was often thick with ferns and wet.
“Run?” Jess stammered. Not that he didn’t know what the word meant, in a very visceral way. He was a born runner. He ran the loop often, sometimes in the morning before school and the same day as a big soccer match. He was known for his speed up the right side.
“Be right back.” Harvey pushed out of the chair and disappeared through the kitchen and came back a couple of minutes later wearing nylon too-short running shorts, tube socks, and shoes Jess recognized as a hot item when he was probably nine. Suddenly Jess was overwhelmed with sadness and compassion; he felt sorry for his uncle and was about to make some lame excuse when Harvey said, “Whoever loses buys the milkshakes,” and was out the door. He waited for Jess on the driveway and bent to touch his toes, bouncing in some awful archaic stretch, and Jess felt worse. Harvey seemed amused. “Not gonna stretch?”
Jess shook his head. He felt queasy.
“Suit yourself.” Harvey lifted one foot behind him, than another, in the classic quad stretch, shook himself all over, took a deep breath, huffed it out, and said, “Okay, let’s go. We’ll warm up nice and easy to Florence’s, then the race is on. ’Kay?”
Jess felt he was being sucked into doing something he really didn’t want to do. He intuited that his relationship with Harvey was about to change forever. He couldn’t look at him. Even at that tender age, he knew that once he humiliated his uncle there was no going back.
They trotted up the climbing dirt road. Very slowly. They passed the old overgrown tennis court at the edge of Frazer’s hayfield, passed Shumlin’s and Doc Brookhauser’s. There was a near-level quarter-mile of good dirt road to Florence’s Japanese teahouse, which Jess’s father—Harvey’s brother—had designed, and Harvey began to lengthen out his stride. At Florence’s carport there was a hayfield ahead and a sharp left turn; they took the bend, and immediately the county maintenance ended and the road became a steep rocky climbing track that at times more resembled a streambed than a road. As soon as they rounded the turn Harvey said, “Okay, race you back to the house.” And he put on the jets.
“Damn.” Jess remembered saying it to himself, and then he leaned hard into the climb.
He had run cross-country. In middle school, when the team was short runners, he ran races that didn’t interfere with soccer games. He knew how to hang on up a hill and then push over the top and break a competitor. It was one of the great satisfactions of the sport. But he could barely hang on to Uncle Harvey. He could hear his own breathing, not the regular chuff of a good run but the gulps of hitting a pulse rate too high. They jumped roots and slid on water-stained granite slabs. They pushed up a very steep cobbled straightaway and crossed the stone wall and contoured through the blueberry meadow and got hit with the sweet smell of apple blossoms wafting up from Darrow’s orchard. Jess had not tasted blood in his mouth for a couple of years, but now he did. The coppery signal that he was pushing too hard. Maybe Harvey had been listening to his breathing. Suddenly he slowed and dropped back, and Jess felt his uncle’s hand briefly on his sweat-soaked T-shirt, and Harvey said, “Wanna jog? Get our second wind?”
Jess thought he might be dreaming. None of this added up. He was certainly not gonna take charity from his freaky but lovable uncle. “Shit, no,” he breathed.
“ ’Kay. See ya at the house.” And then Harvey lengthened out again, and, as smoothly as if he were just hitting his stride, he took off. Into the trees on the other side of the meadow. Jess didn’t see him again until he got to Harvey’s mailbox. Where he was pushing against a maple tree in a stretch he probably learned in the last century. When Harvey heard the pats of Jess’s footfalls he straightened, turned, grinned. “Let’s go to Darcy’s and get the shakes. You still like malts? You can buy next time.”
On the way down the hill in Harvey’s old Bronco, they were silent until Jess finally turned in his seat and said, “How…?”
He didn’t know exactly what he wanted to ask. How could Harvey run like that, certainly, but also How…everything? Basically, he wanted to say, Who the hell was that masked man?
Harvey read his mind. “I run at night,” he said.
Jess felt himself wince as if he were looking into the sun.
“You knew I was in the war, right?”
Jess gaped, nodded.
“That’s kinda why I stick around home. I don’t like most people. Hard to explain, but that’s how it is. I run at night because I don’t want to run into the Brandts or the Brookhausers or the Hollisters. Nothing against ’em, it’s all me.” Harvey reached over and put a hand on Jess’s hot head. “You’re one hell of a runner,” he said. “You have your old man’s toughness.”
