Burn, p.18
Burn, page 18
He peed in the grass where the dock met the bank and let his eyes travel the pocket of valley, the wooded hills and meadowed slopes striped with ravels of mist, and he inhaled the scent of sodden pasture. The smell of rain sifting on cold black water. His gaze swept up to the higher fields, and he saw the ribbon of road where it emerged from the woods at the top of the ridge, and he shook himself and zipped up and froze.
At the top of the road, fog merged with low clouds, and out of it he saw the bulk of a vehicle descending. Then another behind it, and another. Pickup trucks maybe, one larger, size of a farm truck, a troop truck maybe. Three. Jesus.
He ran. Hit the door so hard he almost fell inside.
“Trucks,” he said.
Collie blinked at him; she was trying to straighten the cards into a square deck. Storey was crouched at the wagon, prying cans out of the stack. He dropped them. “Where?”
“Top of the ridge. Road we came on. Coming down.”
Storey was already moving. Storey had the fastest reaction time of any person Jess had ever met, and he had ice in his blood when it counted. “Grab the pot,” Storey said. “The sleeping stuff. Shove it in her wagon. Baling twine on that peg—it’ll get wet but fuck it. I got the food and the girl.”
Ninety seconds later, they had the packs on and rifles slung. Jess remembered his binocs on a hook. Storey yanked open the back door—lucky thing there was one—with his left hand. He looked down at Collie and said, “Can you hold my hand and run?” She didn’t balk or cry. She nodded. She reached up for his hand and he said, “Okay, you’re the leader. You run in front of me. Straight through the grass to those trees. Okay? Three-two-one, go!”
Jess pushed through after them and tugged the door till the latch reseated. The grass in the narrow pasture behind the sugarhouse had been recently mowed, thank God, and would not leave an obvious swish of trail. Plus the heavy rain, which blurred everything and filled the hoofprints of the cows and horses. The meadow was a mess. They ran. It was only forty yards across and then they were in thick woods, pines and hemlocks and untapped maples. A blowdown yellow birch had snapped an old pine, and the fallen trees lay broken and tangled at forest’s edge, and they skirted the ragged stump and threw themselves in behind it. The convoy of three trucks had hit the flat and were turning in on the drive to the cinder pile of the old house. Good. The drivers could have seen them running from the high road but from the level of the valley floor they would not have had the vantage. But they were close now, and there was nothing between them and their pile of dead limbs but open ground.
The three trucks ground on into the farmyard and around the charred timbers of the barn. They turned onto the rough tractor road to the sugarhouse, fuck, two pickups followed by a tarped farm truck with staked wood sides. There were six or eight camo-clad soldiers in the second truck. The first truck had a .50-caliber mounted high in the bed and a man in a green slicker leaned into it. The gun was aimed at the shack as if ready for anyone who came out the front door. Because of course there were people in there: a kerosene lantern glowed through the windows in the storm-dark afternoon and smoke leaked from the stovepipe.
Jess glassed the man. The only mark on his slicker was the Carhartt “C,” but he wore a baseball hat, not a helmet, and on the crown was a red-and-white patch, the shape of Maine outlined in crimson with the number “49” in the center. The man and the pickup passed out of view behind the sugarhouse, where it evidently parked, because the two other trucks jounced to a stop still in sight. Jess heard shouting. Then a burst of automatic fire, percussive. It seemed to shake the rain out of the trees above them. Collie was squeezed between them where they pressed against the birch trunk, and Jess felt her shaking hard. He felt Storey’s arm come around her, heard his quiet “Don’t worry, they won’t hurt us here. I promise.” And Jess felt him push her head down gently and heard him whisper, “Super-quiet, and cover your eyes, ’kay?”
Now out of the back of the farm truck jumped men. A stream, un-uniformed, in rain jackets and oiled coats and surplus ponchos. Carrying long guns, mostly AR-15s and scoped hunting rifles and a few shotguns, pump and auto. On the caps they wore the same patches. Jess counted eleven. He swung the glasses back to the second pickup and was surprised to see that the uniformed soldiers hadn’t moved. Then he saw why: two of the dudes from the bigger truck jogged up and prodded them with gun barrels, and the men tried to stand and jostled each other and two fell over, and Jess saw that they were zip-tied and he saw one of the guards strike the fallen ones with the butt of his rifle. He heard more shouting and the men climbed down too slowly and shuffled, hatless on the mud, and he could see that they were broken, probably beaten to within inches of not being able to walk at all. The two prodded the line of one-two-three-four-five-six captives out of sight behind the sugarhouse. Then, evidently, into it, because they saw in the big windows a crowd of shapes moving. Moving at first chaotically, and then forming what looked like a solid phalanx blotting the light all the way to the ceiling, shoulders maybe, and heads, and then the crashing cavalcade and the windows exploded and men flew through them, airborne in a red spray like so many rags. Jess heard Collie cry out and felt Storey squeeze her, heard his “Hush-hush-hush, Collie, bad men, we’ve gotta stay quiet,” and he heard her stifled shout as Storey covered her mouth and shoved her head down. Jesus. Jess felt her squirm against him as Storey repeated harshly, “Hush, hush, please, Collie, quiet! Or the bad men will kill us!” And she finally hushed or just abated, and she kept her head down and whimpered and shook. They watched as someone arced the kerosene lantern—probably into the stack of split kindling—and someone else must have dumped gasoline, because one side of the room flared and then the flames poured out the windows, despite the rain.
They had stood the prisoners up on the boiling pan and shot them point-blank. They probably had orders. They had fulfilled them and just left the bodies out in the rain. God. They clearly did not have time to search for whoever had been enjoying a pot of coffee, they had bigger fish to fry, they just offed the soldiers and ignited the slaughterhouse and now they were loading back into the bigger truck, and now Jess and Storey heard the engines rev and saw the vehicles back around. They saw the pickup with the machine gun bounce forward and skirt the others and retake the lead. The convoy jounced up the farm track past the remains of the house and turned left on the country road, and Jess lost them in the mist and the rain.
* * *
They would not fare well. Not here, not on the road. Not, probably, at the border with New Hampshire, or with Quebec, either. Had they been caught eating their lunch, sitting on the three pails like characters in some country fable, they would no doubt be sprawled now on the blood-painted grass with the six U.S. Marines.
They huddled behind the blowdown in the steady downpour, and it seemed the shots still echoed down the valley. For a while, no one spoke or moved except for Collie’s shaking, which Jess could feel against his shoulder. She was beyond crying and only trembled as if cold, and Jess heard her whimper to Storey that she was hungry and he heard Storey say, “Sure, sure, hold on,” and Storey squeezed her hard and dropped back to his wagon, where he dug out a can of Mexican flan of all things and found a spoon in an outer pocket of his pack and offered it to her. “Pudding,” he said and she took it and spooned it slowly at first and then more avidly and then with an animal hunger. “More,” she said, and Storey found another can and…repeat.
Their sleeping bags were getting drenched in the other wagon, but there was nothing for it. Though Jess had spread his extra blanket over the top, it was just wool and wasn’t helping much. They needed shelter and a fire to dry things out, but their shelter was being devoured by flames.
They would string up the tarp and rake burning timbers out of the edge of the pyre and start their own fire and try to dry out the sleeping gear. They did. They ventured out and skirted the dead men and went to the dock side of the shack. The burning building threw enough heat that it seemed to evaporate the drizzle, and they could not get closer than about thirty feet. The wall there had collapsed and spilled outward. Good enough. Storey found a stack of steel fence posts in tall grass beside the riding ring. They each had a triangular blade at the base for driving into dirt, and he used one to rake back a pile of embers and scraps of flaming two-by-fours and siding. Then he and Jess headed to the brook at the top of the pond and Collie cried out that she was coming, too, and the three walked together. Storey and Jess found heavy round stones just small enough to grasp, and Collie found one she could carry; they could not walk on the pond side of the burning shack because it was too close to the flames, so they took the meadow behind it and swung way wide of the dead men.
Jess and Storey used the rocks to pound the stakes into the grass, and the ground was sodden, and they drove easily. The two men worked in tandem, but they couldn’t look at each other. They strung the parachute cord four feet up and staked out the tarp into a lean-to and they put Collie underneath it. She sat in the center, in front, like a Buddha in a flickering stupa, and just behind her, under cover, they pounded sticks and strung more line and draped the sleeping bags as best they could. The heat was intense, just bearable, and it warmed and dried Collie and the synthetic bags, too. She peeled out of her raincoat and shook her mane like a true lion, and once Storey gave her the last can of flan and the spoon she lost herself in the fire’s wavering light and the exploding flares of sapwood, and her eyes focused on nothing, and she looked abstracted and not unhappy.
Mid-afternoon but already evening dark. Sky black with storm, and pale fog rolling along the ridges. Jess thought it looked like a classical Japanese pen-and-ink landscape. They stood outside in the rain. There was not room enough under the tarp for her and the drying gear and both of them, and also they needed to talk and not in code.
Jess squeezed his eyes shut against the gusts and hugged himself.
“You okay?” Storey said.
“No.”
“Me, neither.”
“Fuck,” Jess breathed. “Fuckfuckfuck. You hear about stuff like this, in other countries.”
Storey grimaced against the rain, turned his face away from the wind. “It’s not real.”
“It’s real.” Jess shook himself like a dog shedding water. He straightened and tapped Storey’s rain jacket where the shirt pocket of chew would be and he struck the can.
“Thank God,” Storey said. “Good idea.” He unzipped enough to get two fingers down to the can and he slipped it out. He rapped the lid and twisted it off and held the can out to Jess. “We’re gonna run out of this tomorrow. You think any of those poor guys have any on them?”
“You wanna look?”
Storey shook his head.
“The Forty-niners woulda searched them anyway.”
“Right.”
Jess spat. “Everybody’s crazy. Berserk. Everybody’s killing everybody.”
“Yeah.”
“Where did they come from?” Storey closed his eyes as he felt the nicotine hit his bloodstream. He said, “I didn’t even get a chance to finish my coffee. About the best cup I ever had.”
“It’s not safe on the road,” Jess said.
“It’s not safe on the lake. Just ask the Clawdette.”
“We could move through the woods.”
“No, we can’t.”
“I guess not.” Jess turned so that the heat and light of the fire was full on his face, almost the way he would have turned his face to the sun on a winter day. Does one became inured to death? No. But one turns one’s face to the fire, closes eyes, and becomes suspended. Does time work like that? Can we suspend it? Yes. Seems so. Time present and time past.
He drifted for a moment. Without expectation. It was as if whatever the future held passed beneath like an ocean swell.
“You look nuts,” Storey said.
Jess startled.
“You’re upset because you were finally winning at Go Fish,” Storey said.
Jess smiled, shrugged. Storey’s face was still grim but his eyes sparked with the old humor, and it warmed Jess. He spat. “What do you want to do?”
“I don’t have a single good idea. They went west. Straight west, no hesitation, as if they knew there were more of them that way. A lot more.”
“Right.”
“And I’m getting the sense they have zero tolerance for surprises or strangers.” Storey turned, spat. “Nor, apparently, do the other guys.”
“Agreed.”
“So.”
“So.”
“We go back east.”
“We’re starting to yo-yo,” Jess said.
“I don’t know what else to do.”
* * *
In the fall of his senior year, on a Friday night, Jess got a text from Hannah. It surprised him. He hadn’t heard from her all summer, and he didn’t know if that was strange or not. He hadn’t visited her on his own initiative, because he felt shy and figured she had enough on her plate, adapting to her new life in Dummerston. He had stopped by with Storey a handful of times, mostly so that Storey could pick up something from his new room in the 1870s farmhouse. Once, in July, she had asked them to stay for supper, and they ate with her and Cecily on the back porch, which was screened. The porch looked past a clearing to the swift black water of Salmon Brook. There was a round cherry table back there and she had placed a Ball jar brimming with pea flowers and daisies in the center, and the simplicity and the accompanying burble of the brook and Hannah’s familiar bell laugh made Jess feel that maybe she had made the right choice somehow, and he remembered feeling apostate at the thought, disloyal to the union of the family he had loved so much. They ate a cold chicken salad that was delicious, and Hannah gave them each a ginger beer, which was Jess’s favorite. If Cecily, who was usually voluble, didn’t say much, and glanced over at him swiftly now and then, and between bites covered her curled hand with her good one as if protecting it, he didn’t ask himself why.
But now, with the text, Hannah was reaching out just to him. It said, “Hi J, haven’t seen you in many moons. Would you like to come over for an iced tea and catch up? I was thinking tomorrow after your game at Deerfield. You’ve got the old Subaru now, right? Cecily is on the Ridge with Daniel and Annie is at soccer camp. Lmk.” Storey would be with his dad, too, for the next week. He had promised to help Daniel cut firewood out of the sugar bush.
Jess should have been glad. Why did his gut contract? He was seventeen and not old enough to know. He typed back, “Okay, sure.”
She messaged back, “Great. I know you’ll be starving after the game. I’ll make something simple.”
He typed back, “Thanks.”
Thanks. Which was what, truly and simply, was in his heart. Thanks for all of it. For partly, maybe mostly, raising me. For shuttling me everywhere. For teaching me to garden and cook a little. For laughing when my own house was so serious. For insisting on listening to my poems. For guiding me so graciously through that other rite of passage. For—I guess—seeing me full-on, gladly, when my own parents just lowered their reading glasses and looked up over their books.
The next morning, the Saturday of the soccer game, it was raining. A steady, cold October rain not unlike the one that washed the tarp now and dripped off the brims of their Gore-Tex hoods. The field at Deerfield Academy, as perfectly maintained as it was, turned muddy. The rain came in blowing veils. Two players slid and collided and a Deerfield player was taken off the field on a stretcher. No yellow or red card was given, and the game turned physical and then vicious. The ref could not control it. Storey and Jess played hard, in their usual sync, feeding the ball to each other, taking foul hits and recovering balance and pressing attacks. Regular Time ended in a tie, and Putney lost on penalty kicks. The team did not use Deerfield’s field house and drove home in the school bus mostly silent, soaked, covered in mud. It was still drizzling and cold when they got to the Putney campus, and the two boys didn’t even bother to run to Jess’s ancient Outback. They walked slowly, defiantly, together, and let the rain wash off some of the mud. They slammed the doors and Jess cranked the heat and all the windows fogged and they opened them and blasted the defrost and had to wait until the glass cleared.
“That sucked,” Storey said.
“I thought it was kinda fun.”
“We shoulda won.”
“Yeah. Pass me that red rag.” Jess tried to wipe the inside of the windshield, but it just streaked the fog. “We’ve gotta wait a minute.”
Twenty minutes later, when they pulled up to Storey’s house, Storey said, “You wanna come in and have lunch with me and Cecily and Pop? He said he was making burgers.”
“Nah, I better clock in.”
That’s what Jess said when he felt like he’d been spending too much time away from his parents. It was maybe the first time in his life he had deliberately lied to Storey. He was not going to clock in. The county road was not visible from Storey’s house, and Jess was going to drop Storey off at his front door and head down the gravel driveway, but instead of turning left, up the hill to home, he was going to turn right, back down the hill and out Bunker Road to Dummerston. To Hannah. That’s what he did. Storey got out and stood in the rain and leaned back in. He said, “Hey.” His voice sounded brittle. “I’ve gotta cut wood tomorrow,” and Jess said, “I’ll come over and help you guys,” and Storey hesitated a second and shut the door.
Jess drove out the good paved road to Dummerston. Mist hung in the trees and over the fields, and he drove with the window half down so he could smell the wet fall woods. He followed a stone wall and passed the old Aiken dairy farm and Pete Dixon’s artisan-cheese operation. The car’s heat huffed and wheezed and he was warm despite his wet clothes and the rain spraying in. He realized even then that on any normal day he would have felt happy, probably euphoric. He had just played a well-fought soccer game with his best friend, they had played as well as they ever had, his favorite time of year was in full swing, as was one of his favorite kinds of weather, and he was covered in mud. What could be better? Except that inside, somewhere near his diaphragm, he felt a dark churn. Of something akin to shame but deeper in the roots and darker, more subterranean, because it was bound to a willful surrender to something probably very wrong, and the anticipation held a dreadful frisson of excitement and anxiety. All of which squelched any germination of joy. He had lied to Storey, he was heading to meet Hannah, where they would be, by design, in a house alone, and he realized as he drove that he was hard.
